Prisoner of Haven

2

Late day sun felt hot on Usha’s arms and neck as she stood to look at the mullioned windows of Lir Wrackham’s house. Light danced over the rippled glass—four windows of glass!—in imitation of light on the surface of the river. Lir Wrackham had been a wealthy man to have that many windows of glass. As far as Usha knew, there was no glassblower in Haven capable of doing work of greater complexity than cups and candlestick holders. Aline’s husband must have had these windows imported at enormous cost, perhaps from as far away as Tarsis.

The street was quiet. At first Usha thought it was dozing in the sun, most folk keeping indoors for the shade. That might be so in this part of the city where the wealthy had others to work for them, but few servants were to be seen. A black-bearded dwarf wearing a forgeman’s soot-stained leather apron stood across the street talking with a young human woman who held a basket full of fat skeins of blue and white yarn. Usha felt his dark-eyed gaze slip over her then slip away. She saw no one else, nor had she seen much activity in the city as she’d walked from the High Hand Inn to the river and along the cool and willow-shaded paths to this comfortable enclave of Haven’s wealthy. It was a quieter city in the fading afternoon than it had been at dawn when Lir Wrackham’s funeral wound through the streets.

Usha didn’t imagine that whole quarters of Haven had gone into mourning, but when she and Dez had parted at the High Hand, Dez to make the rounds of her usual suppliers, and Usha to offer Aline her condolence, Usha had thought she’d find more than shadows on her friend’s doorstep. She looked up and down the street and saw no sign that anyone had come to offer the widow sympathy.

The house, half built of timber, half of stone, was much like others in this part of Haven, but Usha knew it at once for Aline’s. “You’ll know Mistress Wrackham’s house by the roses,” the landlord at the High Hand had assured her. “That place is a’climb with roses. Rose Hall, the old man called it. Just like he was some nobleman tryin’ to keep his castles and estates in order.”

It was indeed a’climb with roses. The vines and canes reached up the stone foundation, the walls of the bottom floor and up to the timbered second floor upon fanned trellises, red and white entwined as high as the second story. Close to the street, a well-kept bed of peach and ivory-colored roses embraced the front of the house, stretching the length of the short block that began at River Way and ended at Wrackham Street. The beds had been recently watered and the air still smelled of the rich fragrance of wet earth. Usha sipped the scents as though sipping wine. Across the street the woman with the basket on her hip laughed, and the dwarf chuckled as he toyed with a ring on his finger. He slipped another glance Usha’s way.

Well enough, Master Dwarf, she thought. You see me, and I see you.

Smiling, she nodded gracious greeting then turned and climbed the three stone steps to Aline’s door. She did not wait long on the doorstep before a housemaid came to answer. Her name given, Usha was shown to a small room off the entry hall and made comfortable while the servant announced her. Seated beside a window, this one unglazed and open to the air, Usha looked out upon the street. The woman with the yarn basket was gone. The dwarf stood a moment looking at Rose Hall. He tugged his coal-black beard, as though considering a choice, then took a seat upon the bottom step of the house opposite.

“Ah, Dunbrae,” said a voice from the doorway. “He keeps a close and faithful eye on me, doesn’t he? Usha, it’s good to see you.”

Thick and rough, the voice. Madoc Diviner had once described it as being like that of a half-grown boy with the ague. The voice as unattractive as the speaker, the homely girl no young man would look at twice had hoped to study with clerics and bards and spend her life in poetry and scholarship. It was not to be.

“Aline.” Usha rose. “How sorry I am to visit under such sad circumstances.”

“You are kind,” Aline said, stepping around the possibility of her own sorrow.

They had not seen each other in several years, not since Usha and Palin had sent a grimly determined young woman down the White-rage River to her marriage. The marriage would ally the wealthy merchant houses of Caroel and Wrackham, giving the latter access to the long and cherished relationships Aline’s grandfather had in Abanasinia’s merchant and shipping communities. In return for Gault Caroel’s granddaughter and his business contacts, Lir Wrack-ham would continue to fund Qui’thonas, an organization suggested by Laurana, the Queen Mother of the Qualinesti elves and devised by Palin and Usha to rescue the growing number of elves determined to flee their homeland. It had been funded by Gault Caroel himself, until his coffers ran dry. With Aline’s marriage, the effort would continue, and those who simply wanted to flee to peace could do so.

Wrackham had not reneged on his bargain. His bride had come to him, as promised, but he never caught sight of the magical portrait. On their wedding night the locket remained with Madoc. “For no one will love me as you will,” Aline had said when they parted. “No one will ever have the chance, and no matter if I am unhappily wed.” But she was not unhappy in her marriage. The shrewd old merchant had not only a keen eye for business but one that could quickly uncover a person’s character and spirit. In his own way, Lir Wrackham became enchanted. He’d been pleased to give his wife anything she asked for. Aline, who had all her young life believed passionately in the ideal of elven freedom and the freedom of all Krynn from the hateful dragons, had asked for Qui’thonas.

And so Lir Wrackham had not been enspelled by Usha’s magic. Madoc Diviner had. By the mage’s account Aline had gone only reluctantly to her wedding after that. Usha had never heard Aline’s account. Standing now in the oak paneled reception room, among treasures and artwork from distant lands, she wondered what that account would sound like.

Aline held out her hands—large hands, knob-knuckled and brown as those of a farmer’s wife. “By the departed gods, Usha, you never age a moment, let alone a day! You are lovely as ever. But I’m surprised to see you here. I’ve known that Palin’s sister comes to Haven for supplies for the family’s inn, but...” She trailed off when Usha offered no explanation. “Well! It’s good to see you. Will you come and take a glass of wine with me?”

Despite the heat of the day, Aline’s hands were cold. Usha pressed them between hers as she would have her own daughter’s. “Yes, I’d like that.”

But having offered, Aline did not herself seem interested in the golden wine or tempting poppy seed cakes brought by a servant to the high-ceilinged, airy room where she did her best to make her guest comfortable. She poured wine into pale blue goblets, then barely moistened her lips. She served cakes and honey but did not taste them. She paced up and down the length of the richly woven carpet of black and red Tarsian wool while Usha tried to do justice to her hospitality. In these dragon days such carpets as this one, the work of a year or more of a weaver’s life, were worth a king’s ransom. But Aline might as well have been pacing rushes freshly flung from the fields to a cottage floor for all she seemed to be aware of the thickness of wool beneath her feet.

“Aline,” Usha said, setting down her plate and moving her wine glass away from the table edge. “You seem ...”

Aline turned, her long face pale but for two spots of bright red over each cheekbone. “I feel like I could jump out of my skin. I’ve been like this all day. Please—” She managed a smile, an apologetic shrug. “Come walk in the market with me. This house is stifling.”

Outdoors, Usha found the air cooler than before. A fresh breeze was coming off the river. Aline sighed almost contentedly. She had been all day indoors, receiving those who came to offer condolence on Lir Wrackham’s death, deflecting the too-close questions of others who came to ask whether the rich man’s widow lacked for anything.

“These,” she said with grim irony, “are the thoughtful souls who will soon be asking whether the widow lacks for company. Or, more likely, someone to help her spend her inheritance. I’ll have a flock of suitors before long, Usha.” She pushed her thin brown hair away from her face. “Imagine that. An hour ago I shut the doors on them all and gave the servants instructions to let no one in.” She brightened. “But when the housemaid heard your name ... well, Majere isn’t a name to be turned away, is it?”

Usha put her arm through Aline’s as they walked along the quiet street. She glanced right and left, but saw no sign of the dwarf Dunbrae. The breeze off the river drifted fresh through the city, and the nearer they went to the market, the more folk they saw. It was late afternoon when canny housewives sent servants or went themselves while the vendors considered their sales for the day and whether it was better to sell what was left at lower prices than to pack up their wares again.

They walked most of the way in silence, Aline with a look that reminded Usha of the drawn expressions of people she’d seen about the city. It wasn’t until they came to the edge of the great square that had for generations served as Haven’s chief market that Usha felt the sense of a living, breathing city asserting itself. The place was a riot of color, harvested yellow wheat, limes and oranges brought by ship from distant lands, peaches and strawberries grown right here in Abanasinia piled high on farmers’ tables. Women balanced laden baskets on their hips, their clothing summer green, sky blue, and sandy or brown as the river’s edges. But those who had children kept them in tow, and the restless little ones danced and skipped impatiently, longing to race through the market chasing each other.

Usha lifted a silk scarf the color of twilight and listened to it whisper through her fingers, then another the color of brown chestnuts. She purchased them and declined to have them wrapped or sent. With swift, practiced gestures she tied the brown silk loosely around Aline’s neck. “The very color to make your green eyes like emeralds.” She used the other to bind her long silvery hair back from her face and keep it from the tugging fingers of the wind. They moved on, passing the booth of two young people of the Plains, a man and a half-grown girl who offered the beautiful feathers, for which the Plainsfolk were known, and quills for beading and decorating leather work. More than one person stopped to watch them as they moved through the market, the homely young woman, often recognized as Lir Wrackham’s widow, and her ethereally beautiful companion rumored to be Usha Majere.

Comment and whisper followed them, murmured speculation about what Palin Majere’s wife was doing in Haven, about whether the great mage himself were in the city. They went on through the market, Aline pointing out the stalls of jewelers and weavers, of pot throwers and chandlers. They stopped at the stall of a portly fruit-seller who was flapping his hand to keep flies from a gleaming pile of strawberries. His stock was not much in need of replenishing, his mood grim.

“It’s been quiet like this for days now,” Aline said. “I think poor Lir’s funeral was the noisiest thing in two weeks. Most followed along for diversion.” Her eyes darkened and she shrugged as though to dismiss a troublesome thought.

Usha wondered whether Aline had seen Madoc at the back of the crowd. She almost asked, but folded her lips upon the question best left for later.

Aline said, “Mostly we listen for news from the road and the river.”

“Dark knights.”

“Yes. Did you and Dezra have any trouble on the road?”

“No, but we worried about it. Dark knights lurk all over the road between here and Solace, not making trouble yet, but making their presence known. I’ve heard that the green dragon is looking this way. More tribute to be had here than from poor ravaged Qualinesti, they say.”

The breeze quickened, making the awning over the fruit-seller’s stall flap and ripple with a sound like distant thunder. Usha cast a glance at the sky, the blue dome arching over the city and the river shone cloudless.

“More tribute for green Beryl,” she said, “but that’s not the only concern.”

Aline’s eyes darkened. “I know. If Beryl is sending dark knights into Abanasinia, that means she’s ready to challenge Malys.”

It could mean little else, for the pact between the great dragons who had savaged Ansalon’s native dragons and divided the spoils between them in the Dragon Purge was that each would hold its own territory and not try to upset the balance of power between them. That was the pact. In truth, any dragon who could, would amass whatever territory it was able to. Among the dragons, the true contest always lay between the most powerful and devious, green Beryl and red Malys.

“I’ve heard people say,” Usha said while a woman and her impatient child selected a basket of peaches, “that Abanasinia could find itself a sudden battleground. What do you—?”

Quick as a kender, the little boy danced away from his mother, laughing as she lunged to grab him and missed. He spun around to elude her grasp and ran right into Usha. She caught him when his mother’s frustrated cry rang sharply. He wriggled out of her grasp and pushed her back into the table in front of the fruitseller’s stall. Peaches tumbled onto the dusty earth, and strawberries followed in a fountain of red sweetness. The exasperated mother, offering harried apology to Usha, snatched her child out of the mess and out of the market as the fruitseller rounded on Usha with snarling curses.

“Damn it! Isn’t it enough that I can’t sell the damned peaches or strawberries these days? Now look! Ruined!”

Usha and Aline scrambled after rolling peaches, keeping their skirt hems away from the dashed strawberries. To mollify the red-faced seller, Aline bought some strawberries, blueberries, and peaches.

“Please have them sent around to my house,” she asked, counting out the price of the fruit from the coins in the silken pouch at her girdle. She gave him directions. The man knew her at once and fumbled some words of sympathy as he assured her the fruit would be in her kitchen before she herself was at her front door.

At the end of the day, in the failing light, Usha and Aline walked side by side in silence, enjoying the cooling air. When they’d gone so far as to see the roofs of Rose Hall, Usha asked the question that had gone unanswered after the cascade of falling peaches interrupted their conversation.

“Aline, do your people in Qui’thonas have any news about the plans of the dark knights, or perhaps of Beryl herself?”

Aline walked on, her head tilted, as though she were thinking. Then she stopped and when she turned, Usha saw deep sorrow in her friend’s eyes.

“There is no Qui’thonas.” Aline’s voice dropped low, though nothing moved on the street but shadows. “Not anymore. No elves have come out of Qualinesti for some time now. I don’t know what’s happening there. No one does. I used to hear by various ways how they fared in the forest. No more. It’s as though a door has been shut and nailed tight. I can’t send my people to rescue elves who aren’t there. The departed gods help Qualinesti now. We cannot.”

The sky tinted to deeper blue in the east. Over the river the sun hung low.

“Tell me, Usha, how is Palin? Is he well?”

“As far as anyone knows.”

Aline glanced at her sideways. If she drew conclusions from the undertone of bitterness in Usha’s voice, she said nothing more. The two went on in silence, and at the door of Rose Hall Aline said, “Can I send you back to the High Hand in my carriage?”

“Thank you, but no. The tavern is no great distance, and I enjoy a walk in the evening. But... Aline, don’t disband Qui’thonas yet. Don’t send them all away.”

“Not yet,” Aline agreed. “I’m in touch with them, but we’ve let the safehouses go back to being mere homes. The secret ways from the river to the city are no more than deer tracks now.”

They spoke for a little while longer, but not of refugees or threats. Aline did not mention Palin, and Usha did not ask about Madoc.

A motion in the shadows gathering between the houses caught Usha’s eye.

“Dunbrae,” Aline said to Usha. “You’ve met.”

Usha shook her head. “Better to say we’ve seen each other.”

“Good, then. Qui’thonas will see you home. Good night, Usha. Come and see me tomorrow and we’ll talk among the roses while Dezra finishes her business.”

“I will.”

When the two parted no sound came from the shadows, not the scuff of a boot on cobblestone, nor the slightest breath indrawn. But like a shadow himself, Usha sensed the presence of the dwarf Dunbrae as he followed her through the streets of Haven, a silent, unseen watcher to see her safely to the door of the High Hand.

“Look,” Dezra said, thumping her boot heel onto the bench at the opposite side of the scarred plank table. “I know what I’m talking about.”

Usha glanced at the dusty boot and resisted the impulse to tug her skirt away. But for an uninterested barkeeper and the eternally distracted gully dwarf who emptied spittoons, they were alone in the common room of the High Hand. Many of the inn’s rooms were taken—they’d been glad that the landlord had kept one for Dezra—but the mood of the place was quiet, people gathering only at meal times and then drifting back to their rooms. It had been so for three days, and each morning Usha was glad to leave the place, to go walking in the city or by the river, alone or with Aline. Walking, Usha tried to unravel the painful knot of frustrations that had driven her from Solace and her empty house. She had little success. None, if she were being honest with herself. The old questions about Palin, about their increasingly arid marriage, haunted her. She could not drive them off with anger or by ignoring them, nor could she hide from them behind pleasant diversions.

Since the morning she’d awakened to find Palin gone, Usha had found no comfort in Solace, and in Haven no refuge from her doubts.

Each evening, Dez would return, kicking her own frustration into the nearly empty common room ahead of her, no closer to fulfilling her mission of ordering supplies for her family’s inn.

“I’m telling you, Usha, something’s wrong.”

Dezra shifted in her seat, her frown deepening to a scowl. She moved to slip her dagger from its sheath, then caught the barkeeper’s eye and resisted the impulse to mar the table more. She reminded many people of her infamous aunt, the dragon highlord Kitiara. Golden of hair and skin where Kitiara had been dark and pale, still Dez recalled the fabled highlord in face and form. Caramon, her father, didn’t like to think so, but Dezra had grown up on stories of Kitiara uth Matar, Caramon’s half-sister. The warrior had ruled nearly half the continent of Ansalon before the War of the Lance ended. It was not in Dezra’s nature to seek or embrace the darkness as Kitiara had, but no one doubted that Dez had inherited her aunt’s fierce and restless spirit.

Across the room Banlath the barkeeper sent the gully dwarf to clean the kitchen while he continued wiping the gleaming oak bar, polishing the wood till it shone. He whistled tunelessly through gapped front teeth and did not seem to be paying attention to the two women sitting alone and talking. Still, Dez lowered her voice and dropped her foot from the bench to lean closer to Usha.

“I come here every year. You know that.”

Usha nodded as she finished the last of her supper, a plump patty of flaked fish seasoned with spices and herbs.

“Every year,” Dez said, “I go to Rinn Gallan’s uncle to order the hops, and I go to Varal Kamer for the wine from his own vineyards—even the white my father says isn’t as good as the elven stuff.” She snorted. “But who can get elven wine these days? Probably not even elves.”

“And dwarf spirits,” Usha said. She’d heard the litany before. “I know, Dez. So, what’s wrong?”

“No one has any. Rinn’s uncle knew I was coming from the first day I arrived. From what Rinn said when he saw us, we were expected and welcome. But now—and suddenly, if you ask me—no one has anything. No hops, no wine, and for some reason, in this city where hill dwarves have lived for gods only know how long—” Again, Dez’s boot heel thumped on the bench—“not a drop of dwarf spirits to be found. Or,” she said, darkly, “none to sell. Whatever farmers are selling in the market, the serious merchants seem to have nothing.”

“All your suppliers?”

“Not just mine. Everyone’s! You can’t buy flour in any great quantity, nor grain or seed either. The poulterers aren’t killing their chickens, and shepherds aren’t bringing their flocks in from the hills.”

Listening to Dez was like watching shadows begin to coalesce into an ominous image. “They’re stockpiling. Aline says they’ve been edgy here all summer. We’ve seen that since we arrived. Who wouldn’t be with the air full of rumors about Beryl moving dark knights around? But edgy is one thing ...”

Dez nodded. “Stockpiling is another.”

Usha looked over her shoulder at the barman and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Aline tells me Qui’thonas has heard nothing about an impending attack, but... people decide to hoard for two reasons, don’t they? Either they’re afraid. Really afraid. Or they’re hoping to make a tidy pile of coin once a shortage sets in.”

“Or both.”

Outside the sky had gone dark enough for stars to shine. They heard the cry of a watchman on the city wall, faint and distant. Closer, the clop of a horse’s hooves and the murmur of its rider as they passed by the tavern door.

“Usha, let’s get out of here. Something’s up. Something’s going to happen.”

Usha felt it, a creeping sense of doom like the stillness before a storm.

“First thing tomorrow,” she said. “We can come back later—or find what we need somewhere else and let people remember this as the year the ale wasn’t as good as usual at your father’s inn. Much better than remembering it as the year we went for a trip to Haven and never came home.”

It did not take them long to pack, and Usha paid the landlord his due while Dez saw that their horses were fed an extra measure of oats. They would not take time for those things in the morning. They wanted to be at the gates when the sun rose over the river.

Seated high upon the back of his black dragon, Sir Radulf Eigerson, the knight known as Red Wolf, took his talon of dragons across the night sky. The Qualinesti Forest was a vast darkness below until, surging lower over the White-rage River, they left the elf kingdom and entered the Free Realm of Abanasinia. At Sir Radulf’s command, with the moon behind them, the six red dragons dropped over the river and followed its gleaming waters through Darken Wood until the walled city of Haven came into view.

Sir Radulf pumped his fist twice, and the talon separated into three parts, sailing out ahead of him. A word of command leaped from his mind to that of Ebon, his great black dragon. The beast’s spiny crest rose—dark, killing joy gleamed in her eyes. With a powerful thrust of her wings, Ebon flew higher and circled the city in wide loops. From this height, Sir Radulf watched as his six knights took their red dragons into a long-practiced maneuver. Two at the north end of the city, two at the south, and the third pair soaring over the center of Haven, the dark knights set their dragons to work.

Great gouts of fire poured from enormous, fanged jaws. Mounted upon high-backed, tall-fronted saddles hung with weapons and chased with silver, encased in armor as black as the hide of the talon’s leader, a half dozen knights guided their beasts in carefully coordinated flight, igniting roofs, destroying a tall-masted ship moored at the riverside and setting the wooden piers alight.

Tracing the brilliant line of flames racing along the waterfront as the piers burnt, Sir Radulf urged Ebon lower, the better to watch his talon at work. The red dragons’ wide, leathery wings beat the air with a sound like thunder.

Connected one to the other in heart and mind, the knight felt Ebon’s wild surge of bloodlust, her fierce urge to be with her comrades at the killing. He had some sympathy for the dragon’s feelings, but Sir Radulf held the beast back. He would not give in to that kind of thing himself nor allow it in his knights; he would not permit it in the dragon. Savagery was for foot soldiers, draconians, goblins, brutes, and those humans who hadn’t the skill or wit to be more than battle fodder.

Over the river, one red broke ranks with his partner. The lady knight Mearah sent her dragon lower to set alight a line of piers on the side of the river where the tall houses of Haven’s wealthy sat upon brooding clifftops. She was a fierce one, Lady Mearah, the daughter of an old Solamnic family who’d found her warrior spirit needed the kind of fire that had become nothing but ember and ash among Solamnics. Lady Mearah warmed herself at grim fires and rumor said her kin referred to Lady Mearah as the fallen child. In her hands, the operation she and Sir Radulf had so perfectly envisioned and planned was now being faultlessly executed. It would win the praise of their masters in Neraka, perhaps the approval of the green dragon herself.

And so Sir Radulf would allow nothing to interfere in its execution. To him, smiling thinly behind the black mask of his helm, the sounds of terror drifting up from the ground were not a call to join in a slaughter. They simply meant that all was going as planned.