The Curse of Chalion

Chapter 23

At the last moment, with principles agreed upon, treaties written out in multiple copies in a fair court hand, signed by all parties and their witnesses, and sealed, practicalities nearly brought all to a halt. The Fox, not without reason in Cazaril’s view, balked at sending his son into Chalion with so little guarantee of his personal safety. But the roya had neither the men nor the money in his war-weary royacy to raise a large force to guard Bergon, and Cazaril was fearful of the effect upon Chalion of taking arms across the border, even in so fair a cause. Their debate grew heated; the Fox, shamed by the reminder that he owed Bergon’s very life to Cazaril, took to avoiding Cazaril’s petitions in a way that reminded Cazaril forcibly of Orico.

Cazaril received Iselle’s first ciphered letter, via the relay of couriers from the Daughter’s Order that he had set up on their outbound route. It had been penned just four days after he had left Cardegoss, and was brief, simply confirming that Teidez’s funeral rites had taken place without incident, and that Iselle would leave the capital that afternoon with his cortege for Valenda and the interment. She noted, with obvious relief, Our prayers were answered—the sacred animals showed the Son of Autumn has taken him up after all. I pray he will find ease in the god’s good company. She added, My eldest brother lives, and has back sight in one eye. But he remains very swollen. He stays at home, abed. More chillingly, she reported: Our enemy has set two of his nieces as ladies-in-waiting in my household. I will not be able to write often. The Lady speed your embassy.

He looked in vain for a postscript from Betriz, nearly missing it till he turned the paper over. Minute numbers in her distinctive hand lay half-hidden beneath the cracked wax of the seal itself. He scraped at the residue with his thumbnail. The brief notation thus revealed led him to a page toward the back of the book, one of Ordol’s most lyrical prayers: a passionate plea for the safety of a beloved one who traveled far from home. How many years—decades—had it been since someone far away had prayed just for him? Cazaril wasn’t even sure if this had been meant for his eyes, or only for those of the gods, but he touched the tiny cipher secretly to the five sacred points, lingering a little on his lips, before leaving his chamber to seek Bergon.

He shared the other side of the letter with the royse, who studied it, and the code system, with fascination. Cazaril composed a brief note telling of the success of his mission, and Bergon, his tongue clamped between his teeth, laboriously ciphered out a letter in his own hand to go to his new betrothed along with it.

Cazaril counted days in his head. It was impossible that dy Jironal not have spies in the court of Ibra. Sooner or later, Cazaril’s appearance there must be reported back to Cardegoss. How soon? Would dy Jironal guess that Cazaril’s negotiations on Iselle’s behalf had prospered so stunningly? Would he seize the royesse’s person, would he calculate Cazaril’s next move, would he try to intercept Bergon in Chalion?

After several days of the deadlock over the royse’s safety, Cazaril, in a burst of genius, sent Bergon in to argue his own case. This was an envoy the Fox could not evade, not even in his private chambers. Bergon was young and energetic, his imagination passionately engaged, and the Fox was old and tired. Worse, or perhaps, from Cazaril’s point of view, better, a town in South Ibra of the late Heir’s party rose in arms about some failure of treaty, and the Fox was forced to muster men to ride out to pacify it again. Frenzied with the dilemma, torn between his great hopes and his icy fears for his sole surviving son, the Fox threw the resolution back upon Bergon and his coterie.

Resolution, Cazaril was discovering, was one thing Bergon did not lack. The royse quickly endorsed Cazaril’s scheme to travel lightly and in disguise across the hostile country between the Ibran border and Valenda. For escort Bergon chose, besides Cazaril and the dy Guras, only three close companions: two young Ibran lords, dy Tagille and dy Cembuer, and the only slightly older March dy Sould.

The enthusiastic dy Tagille proposed that they travel as a party of Ibran merchants bound for Cardegoss. Cazaril did insist that all the men, noble or humble, who rode with the royse be experienced in arms. The group assembled within a day of Bergon’s decision, in what Cazaril prayed was secrecy, at one of dy Tagille’s manors outside Zagosur. It was not, Cazaril discovered, so small a company as all that; with servants, it came to over a dozen mounted men and a baggage train of half a dozen mules. In addition the servants led four fine matched white Ibran mountain ponies meant as a gift for Bergon’s betrothed, in the meantime doubling as spare mounts.

They started off in high spirits; the companions obviously thought it a high and noble adventure. Bergon was more sober and thoughtful, which pleased Cazaril, who felt as though he were leading a party of children into caverns of madness. But at least in Bergon’s case, not blindly. Which was better than the gods had done for him, Cazaril reflected darkly. He wondered if the curse could be tricking him, leading them all into war and not out of it. Dy Jironal hadn’t started out so corrupt, either.

Being limited to the speed of the slowest pack mule, the pace was not so painful as the race to Zagosur had been. The climb up from the coast to the base of the Bastard’s Teeth took four full days. Another letter from Iselle caught up with Cazaril there, this one written some fourteen days after he’d departed Cardegoss. She reported Teidez buried with due ceremony in Valenda, and her success in her ploy of remaining there, extending her visit to her bereaved mother and grandmother. Dy Jironal had been forced to return to Cardegoss by reports of Orico’s worsening ill health. Unfortunately, he had left behind not only his female spies, but also several companies of soldiers to guard Chalion’s new Heiress. I’m taking thought what to do about them, Iselle reported, a turn of phrase that brought up the hairs on the back of Cazaril’s neck. She also included a private letter to Bergon, which Cazaril passed along unopened. Bergon didn’t share its contents, but he smiled frequently over Ordol’s pages as he deciphered it, head bent close to the candles in their stuffy inn chamber.

More encouragingly, the Provincara had included a letter of her own, declaring that Iselle had received private promises of support for the Ibran marriage not only from her uncle the provincar of Baocia, but three other provincars as well. Bergon would have defenders, when he arrived.

When Cazaril showed this note to Bergon, the royse nodded decisively. “Good. We go on.”

They suffered a check nonetheless here, when discouraged travelers coming back down the road to their inn that night reported the pass blocked with new snow. Consulting the map and his memory, Cazaril led the company instead a day’s ride to the north, to a higher and less frequented pass still reported clear. The reports proved correct, but two horses strained their hocks on the climb. As they neared the divide, the March dy Sould, who claimed himself more comfortable on the deck of a ship than the back of a horse, and who had been growing quieter and quieter all morning, suddenly leaned over the side of his saddle and vomited.

The company bunched to a wheezing halt on the trail, while Cazaril, Bergon, and Ferda consulted, and the usually witty dy Sould mumbled embarrassed and disturbingly muddled apologies and protests.

“Should we stop and build a fire, and try to warm him?” the royse asked in worry, staring around the desolate slopes.

Cazaril, himself standing half-bent-over, replied, “He’s dazed as a man in a high fever, but he’s not hot. He’s seacoast-bred. I think this is not an infection, but rather a sickness that sometimes overcomes lowlanders in the heights. In either case, it will be better to care for him down out of this miserable rocky wilderness.”

Ferda, eyeing him sideways, asked, “How are you doing, my lord?”

Bergon, too, frowned at him in concern.

“Nothing that stopping and sitting down here will improve. Let’s push on.”

They mounted again, Bergon riding near to dy Sould when the trail permitted. The sick man clung to his saddle with grim determination. Within half an hour, Foix gave a thin and breathless whoop, and pointed to the cairn of rocks that marked the Ibra-Chalion border. The company cheered, and paused briefly to add their stones. They began the descent, steeper even than the climb. Dy Sould grew no worse, reassuring Cazaril of his diagnosis. Cazaril grew no better, but then, he didn’t expect to.

In the afternoon, they came over the lower lip of a barren vale and dropped into a thick pine wood. The air seemed richer here, even if only with the sharp delicious scent of the pines, and the bed of needles underfoot cushioned the horses’ sore feet. The sighing trees sheltered them all from the wind’s prying fingers. As they rounded a curve, Cazaril’s ears picked up the muffled thump of trotting hooves from the path ahead, the first fellow traveler they had encountered all day; just one rider, though, so no danger to their number.

The rider was a grizzled man with fierce bushy eyebrows and beard, dressed in stained leathers. He hailed them and, a little to Cazaril’s surprise, pulled up his shaggy horse across their path.

“I am castle warder to the Castillar dy Zavar. We saw your company coming down the vale, when the clouds broke. My lord sends me to warn you, there is a storm blowing up the valley. He invites you to shelter with him till the worst is past.”

Dy Tagille greeted this offer of hospitality with delight. Bergon dropped back and lowered his voice to Cazaril. “Do you think we ought, Caz?”

“I’m not sure . . .” He tried to think if he’d ever heard of a Castillar dy Zavar.

Bergon glanced at his friend dy Sould, drooping over his pommel. “I’d give much to get him indoors. We are many, and armed.”

Cazaril allowed, “We’d not make good speed in a blizzard, besides the risk of losing the trail.”

The grizzled castle warder called out, “Suit yourselves, gentlemen, but since it’s my job to collect the bodies from the ditches in this district come spring, I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d accept. The storm will blow through before morning, I’d guess.”

“Well, I’m glad we at least got over the pass before this broke. Yes,” decided Bergon. He raised his voice. “We thank you, sir, and do accept your lord’s kind offer!”

The grizzled man saluted, and nudged his horse back down the road. A mile farther on, he wheeled to the left and led them up a fainter trail through the tall, dark pines. The path dropped, then rose steeply for a time, zigzagging. The horses’ haunches bunched and surged, pushing them uphill. Away through the trees, Cazaril could hear the distant squabbling and cawing of a flock of crows, and was comforted in memory.

They broke out into the gray light upon a rocky spur. Perched on the outcrop rose a small and rather dilapidated fortress built of undressed native stone. An encouraging curl of smoke rose from its chimney.

They passed under a fieldstone arch into a courtyard paved with slates; a stable opened directly onto it, as well as a broad wooden portico over the doors leading into the main hall. Its margins were cluttered with tools, barrels, and odd trash. Curing deer hides were nailed up to the stable wall. Some tough-looking men, servants or grooms or guards or all three in this rough rural household, moved from the portico to help with the party’s horses and mules. But it was the nearly half dozen new ghosts, whirling frantically about the courtyard, that opened Cazaril’s eyes wide and stopped the breath in his throat.

That they were fresh, he could tell by their crisp gray outlines, still holding the forms they’d had in life: three men, a woman, and a weeping boy. The woman-shape pointed to the grizzled man. White fire streamed from her mouth, silent screams.

Cazaril jerked his horse back beside Bergon’s, leaned over, and muttered, “This is a trap. Look to your weapons. Pass the word.” Bergon fell back beside dy Tagille, who in turn bent to speak quietly to a pair of the party’s grooms. Cazaril smiled in dissimulation, and sidled his horse over to Foix’s, where he held up his hand before his mouth as if sharing a jest, and repeated the warning. Foix smiled blandly and nodded. His eyes darted around the courtyard, counting up the odds, as he leaned toward his brother.

The odds did not seem ill, but for that rangy lout up on the wooden perch beside the gate, leaning against the inner wall, a crossbow dangling, as if casually, from his hand. Except that it was cocked. Cazaril maneuvered back by Bergon, putting himself and his horse between the royse and the gate. “’Ware bowman,” he breathed. “Duck under a mule.”

The ghosts were darting from place to place about the yard, pointing out concealed men behind the barrels and tools, shadowed in the stalls, and, apparently, waiting just inside the main door. Cazaril revised his opinion of the odds. The grizzled man motioned to one of his men, and the gate swung shut behind the party. Cazaril twisted in his saddle and dug his hand into his saddlebag. His fingers touched silk, then the smooth coolness of round beads; he had not pawned Dondo’s pearls in Zagosur because the price was disadvantageous there, so close to the source. He swept his hand up, drawing out the glistening rope of them in a grand gesture. As he swung the string around his head, he popped the cord with his thumb. Pearls spewed off the end of the line and bounced about the slate-paved court. The startled toughs laughed, and began to dive for them.

Cazaril dropped his arm, and shouted, “Now!”

The grizzled commander, who had apparently been just about to shout a similar order, was taken aback. Cazaril’s men drew steel first, falling upon the distracted enemy. Cazaril half fell out of his saddle just before a crossbow bolt thunked into it. His horse reared and bolted, and he scrambled to pull his own sword out of its scabbard.

Foix, bless the boy, had managed to get his own crossbow quietly unshipped before the chaos of shouting men and plunging horses struck. One of the male ghosts streaked past Cazaril’s inner eye, and pointed at an obscured shape dodging along the top of the portico. Cazaril tapped Foix’s arm, and shouted, “Up there!” Foix cocked and whirled just as a second bowman popped up; Cazaril could swear the frantic ghost tried to guide the quarrel. It entered the bowman’s right eye and dropped him instantly. Foix ducked and began recocking; the ratcheting mechanism whirred.

Cazaril, turning to seek an enemy, found one seeking him. From the main door, steel drawn, barged a startlingly familiar form: Ser dy Joal, dy Jironal’s stirrup-man, whom Cazaril had last seen in Cardegoss. Cazaril raised his sword just in time to deflect dy Joal’s first furious blow. His belly twinged, cramped, then knotted agonizingly as they circled briefly for advantage, and then dy Joal bore in.

The excruciating belly pain drained the strength from Cazaril’s arm, almost doubling him over; he barely beat off the next attack, and counterattack was suddenly out of the question. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the female ghost curl tightly in upon herself. She—or was that a pearl?—or both united, somehow slid under dy Joal’s boot. Dy Joal skidded violently and unexpectedly forward, flailing for balance. Cazaril’s point rammed through his throat and lodged briefly in the bones of his neck.

A hideous shock ran up Cazaril’s arm. Not just his belly but his whole body seemed to cramp, and his vision blurred and darkened. Within him, Dondo screamed in triumph. The death demon surged up like a whirling fire behind his eyes, eager and implacable. Cazaril convulsed, vomiting. In Cazaril’s uncontrolled recoil, his sword ripped out sideways; vessels spurted, and dy Joal collapsed at his feet in a welter of blood.

Cazaril found himself on his hands and knees on the icy slates, his sword, dropped from his nerveless hand, still ringing faintly. He was trembling all over so badly he could not stand up again. He spat bile from his watering mouth. On his sword’s point, as it lay on the stone, dy Joal’s wet blood steamed and smoked, blackening. Surges of nausea swept through his swollen and pulsing abdomen.

Inside him, Dondo wailed and howled in frustrated rage, slowly smothered again to silence. The demon settled back like a stalking cat on its belly, watchful and tense. Cazaril clenched and unclenched his hand, just to be sure he was still in possession of his own body.

So. The death demon wasn’t fussy whose souls filled its buckets, so long as there were two of them. Cazaril’s and Dondo’s, Cazaril’s and some other killer’s—or victim’s—he wasn’t just sure which, or if it even mattered, under the circumstances. Dondo clearly had hoped to cling to his body, and let Cazaril’s soul be ripped away. Leaving Dondo in, so to speak, possession. Dondo’s goals and those of the demon were, it seemed, slightly divergent. The demon would be happy if Cazaril died in any way at all. Dondo wanted a murder, or a murdering.

Sunk strengthless to the stones, tears leaking between his eyelids, Cazaril became aware that the noise had died down. A hand touched his elbow, and he flinched. Foix’s distressed voice came to his ear, “My lord? My lord, are you wounded?”

“Not . . . not stabbed,” Cazaril got out. He blinked, wheezing. He reached out for his blade, then jerked his hand back, fingertips stinging. The steel was hot to the touch. Ferda appeared on his other side, and the two brothers drew him to his feet. He stood shivering with reaction.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” said Ferda. “That dark-haired lady in Cardegoss promised us the royesse would have our ears if we did not bring you back to her alive.”

“Yes,” put in Foix, “and that she would have the rest of our skins for a drum head, thereafter.”

“Your skins are safe, for now.” Cazaril rubbed his watering eyes and straightened a little, staring around. A sergeantly-looking groom, sword out, had half a dozen of the toughs lying facedown on the slates in surrender. Three more bandits sat leaning against the stable wall, moaning and bleeding. Another servant was dragging up the body of the dead crossbowman.

Cazaril scowled down at dy Joal, lying sprawled before him. They hadn’t exchanged a single word in their brief encounter. He was deeply sorry he’d torn out the bravo’s lying throat. His presence here implied much, but confirmed nothing. Was he dy Jironal’s agent or acting on his own?

“The leader—where is he? I want to put him to the question.”

“Over there, my lord”—Foix pointed—“but I’m afraid he won’t be answering.”

Bergon was just rising from the examination of an unmoving body; the grizzled man, alas.

Ferda said uneasily, in a tone of apology, “He fought fiercely and wouldn’t surrender. He had wounded two of our grooms, so Foix finally downed him with a crossbow bolt.”

“Do you think he really was the castle warder here, my lord?” Foix added.

“No.”

Bergon picked his way over to him, sword in hand, and looked him up and down in worry. “What do we do now, Caz?”

The female ghost, grown somewhat less agitated, was beckoning him toward the gate. One of the male ghosts, equally urgent, was beckoning him toward the main door. “I . . . I follow, momentarily.”

“What?” said Bergon.

Cazaril tore his gaze away from what only his inner eye saw. “Lock them”—he nodded toward their surrendered foes—“up in a stall, and set a guard. Whole and wounded together for now. We’ll tend to them after our own. Then send a body of able men to search the premises, see if there are any more hiding. Or . . . or anybody else. Hiding. Or . . . whatever.” His eye returned to the gate, where the streaming woman beckoned again. “Foix, bring your bow and sword and come with me.”

“Should we not take more men, lord?”

“No, I don’t think so . . .”

Leaving Bergon and Ferda to direct the mopping-up, Cazaril at last headed for the gate. Foix followed, staring as Cazaril turned without hesitation down a path into the pines. As they walked along it, the cries of the crows grew louder. Cazaril braced himself. The path opened out onto the edge of a steep ravine.

“Bastard’s hell,” whispered Foix. He lowered his bow and touched the five theological points, forehead-lip-navel-groin-heart, in a warding gesture.

They’d found the bodies.

They were thrown upon the midden, tumbled down the edge of the crevasse atop years of kitchen and stable yard waste. One younger man, two older; in this rural place it was not possible to distinguish certainly master from man by dress, as all wore practical working leathers and woolens. The woman, plump and homely and middle-aged, was stripped naked, as was the boy, who appeared to have been about five. Both mutilated according to a cruel humor. Violated, too, probably. Dead about a day, Cazaril judged by the progress the crows had made. The woman-ghost was weeping silently, and the child-ghost clung to her and wailed. They were not god-rejected souls, then, just sundered, still dizzied from their deaths and unable to find their way without proper ceremonies.

Cazaril fell to his knees, and whispered, “Lady. If I am alive in this place, you must be, too. If it please you, give these poor spirits ease.”

The ghostly faces changed, rippling from woe to wonder; the insubstantial bodies blurred like sun diffractions in a high, feathered cloud, then vanished.

After about a minute Cazaril said muzzily, “Help me up, please.”

The bewildered Foix levered him up with a hand under his elbow. Cazaril staggered around and started back up the path.

“My lord, should we not look around for others?”

“No, that’s all.”

Foix followed him without another word.

In the slate-paved courtyard, they found Ferda and an armed groom just emerging again from the main doorway.

“Did you find anyone else?” Cazaril asked him.

“No, my lord.”

Beside the door, only the young male ghost still lingered, although its luminescent body seemed to be ribboning away like smoke in a wind. It writhed in a kind of agony, gesturing Cazaril on. What dire urgency was it that turned it from the open arms of the goddess to cling to this wounded world? “Yes, yes, I’m coming,” Cazaril told it.

It slipped inside; Cazaril motioned Foix and Ferda, looking uneasily at him, to follow on. They passed through the main hall and under a gallery, back through the kitchens, and down some wooden stairs to a dark, stone-walled storeroom.

“Did you search in here?” Cazaril called over his shoulder.

“Yes, my lord,” said Ferda.

“Get more light.” He stared intently at the ghost, which was now circling the room in agitation, whirling in a tightening spiral. Cazaril pointed. “Move those barrels.”

Foix rolled them aside. Ferda clattered back down from the kitchen with a brace of tallow candles, their flames yellow and smoky but bright in the gloom. Concealed beneath the barrels they found a stone slab in the floor with an iron ring set in it. Cazaril motioned to Foix again; the boy grabbed the ring and strained, and shifted the slab up and aside, revealing narrow steps descending into utter blackness.

From below, a faint voice cried out.

The ghost bent to Cazaril, seeming to kiss his forehead, hands, and feet, and then streamed away into eternity. A faint blue sparkle, like a chord of music made visible, glittered for a moment in Cazaril’s second sight, and was gone. Ferda, the candles in one hand and his drawn sword in the other, cautiously descended the stone steps.

Clamor and babble wafted back up through the dank slot. In a few moments, Ferda appeared again, supporting up the stairs a disheveled stout old man, his face bruised and battered, his legs shaking. Following in his wake, weeping for gladness, a dozen other equally shattered people climbed one by one.

The freed prisoners all fell upon Ferda and Foix with questions and tales at once, inundating them; Cazaril leaned unobtrusively upon a barrel and pieced together the picture. The stout man proved the real Castillar dy Zavar, a distraught middle-aged woman his castillara, and two young people a son and a—in Cazaril’s view, miraculously spared—daughter. The rest were servants and dependents of this rural household.

Dy Joal and his troop had descended upon them yesterday, at first seeming merely rough travelers. Only when a couple of the bravos had made to molest the castillar’s cook, and her husband and the real castle warder had gone to her defense and attempted to eject the unwelcome visitors, had steel been drawn. It truly was the house’s custom to take in benighted or storm-threatened wayfarers from the road over the pass. No one here had known or recognized dy Joal or any of his men.

The old castillar gripped Ferda’s cloak anxiously. “My elder son, does he live? Have you seen him? He went to my castle warder’s aid . . .”

“Was he a young man of about these men’s age”—Cazaril nodded to the dy Gura brothers—“dressed in wool and leathers like your own?”

“Aye . . .” The old man’s face drained in anticipation.

“He is in the care of the gods, and much comforted there,” Cazaril reported factually.

Cries of grief greeted this news; wearily, Cazaril mounted the stairs to the kitchen in the mob’s wake, as they spread out to regain their house, recover their dead, and care for the wounded.

“My lord,” Ferda murmured to him, as Cazaril paused briefly to warm himself by the kitchen fire, “had you ever been to this house before?”

“No.”

“Then how did you—I heard nothing, when I looked in that cellar. I would have left those poor people to die of thirst and hunger and madness in the dark.”

“I think dy Joal’s men would have confessed to them, before the night was done.” Cazaril frowned grimly. “Among the many other things I intend to learn from them.”

The captured bravos, under a duress Cazaril was happy to allow and the freed housemen eager to supply, told their half of the tale soon enough. They were a mixed lot, including some lawless and impoverished discharged soldiers who had followed the grizzled man, and a few local hirelings, one of whom had led them to dy Zavar’s holding for sake of its amazing vantage of the road from its highest tower. Dy Joal, riding to the Ibran border alone and in a hurry, had picked them all up from a town at the foot of these mountains, where they had formerly eked out a living alternating between guarding travelers and robbing them.

The bravos knew only that dy Joal had come there looking to waylay a man expected to be riding over the passes from Ibra. They did not know who their new employer really was, although they’d despised his courtier’s clothes and mannerisms. It was abundantly clear to Cazaril that dy Joal had not been in control of the men he’d hastily hired. When the altercation about the cook had tipped over into violence, he’d not had either the nerve or the muscle to stop it, administer discipline, or restore order before events had run their ugly course.

Bergon, disturbed, drew Cazaril aside in the flickering torchlight of the courtyard where this rough-and-ready interrogation was taking place. “Caz, did I bring this wretched chance down upon poor dy Zavar’s good people?”

“No, Royse. It’s clear dy Joal was expecting only me, riding back as Iselle’s courier. Chancellor dy Jironal has sought to tear me from her service for some time—secretly assassinate me, if there proved no other way. How I wish I hadn’t killed that fool! I’d give my teeth to know how much dy Jironal knows by now.”

“Are you sure the chancellor set this trap?”

Cazaril hesitated. “Dy Joal had a personal grudge against me, but . . . the world knew merely that I’d ridden to Valenda. Dy Joal could only have had surmise of my true route from dy Jironal. Therefore, we may be certain dy Jironal had some report of me from his spies in Ibra. His knowledge of our real aim lags—but not, I think, by much. Dy Joal was a stopgap, hurriedly dispatched. And certainly not the only such agent. Something else must follow.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know. Dy Jironal commands the Order of the Son; he can draw on its men as soon as he can evolve a plausible enough lie by which to move them.”

Bergon tapped his sheathed sword against his leather-clad thigh, and frowned up at the sky, which was clearing as evening fell. The mountain spines to the west were black silhouettes against a lingering green glow, and the first stars shone overhead. The grizzled man’s tale of an approaching blizzard had proved a mere decoy, although a light snow squall that had blown through earlier might have been the seed of the idea. “The moon is nearly full, and will be well up by midnight. If we ride both night and day, perchance we can push across this disturbed country before dy Jironal can bring up any more reinforcements.”

Cazaril nodded. “Let him rush his men to patrol a border that we’re already across? Good. I like it.”

Bergon studied him in doubt. “But . . . will you be able to ride, Caz?”

“I’d rather ride than fight.”

Bergon sighed agreement. “Yes.”

The grateful, grieving Castillar dy Zavar pressed all the refreshment his disrupted household could spare upon them. Bergon decided to leave the mules, injured grooms, and lamed horses in his care, to follow on when they could, and lighten his own party thereby. Ferda selected the fastest, soundest horses, and made sure they were rubbed down well and fed and rested until time to start. March dy Sould had recovered after a few hours of rest in this more nourishing air, and insisted on accompanying the royse. Dy Cembuer, who had suffered a broken arm and some freely bleeding cuts in the courtyard fight, undertook to stay with the grooms and baggage and assist dy Zavar until all were ready to travel.

The problem of justice upon the brigands, Cazaril was relieved to leave to their victims. Bergon’s midnight departure would spare them having to witness the hangings at dawn. He left the scattered portion of Dondo’s pearls for the stricken household to collect, and tucked the remains of the rope back in his saddlebag.

The royse’s cavalcade took to the road again when the moon rose over the hills before them, filling the snowy vales with liquid light. There would be no turning aside now before Valenda.