Weasel's Luck

Chapter One

It started on the night of the banquet I did not attend.

While the others were celebrating, I was cleaning my eldest brother Alfric’s chambers, sweeping away the daily confusion of soiled clothes, of bones, of melon rinds. It was like a midden in there, like an ogre’s den. Surely the missing servants were only hiding from Alfric somewhere in the moat house, and would turn up shortly.

Don’t misunderstand me. It would be wrong, then or now, to compare my brother to an ogre. An ogre is larger, more lethal. Probably brighter.

Yet Alfric was bright enough to have me sweeping his quarters, soaping his windows, while he and the rest of the family sat down to supper with an honorable guest. For eight years running he had blackmailed me for the smallest of misdeeds, so that while the sons of other Solamnic Knights had spent their teens in horsemanship and falconry, I had spent mine in sweeping and dread, for reasons . . . well, the reasons come later. Let it just be said that at seventeen I was feeling too old to be my brother’s keeper. While I stirred the dust in his quarters, Alfric sat in the great hall, at the table where Father entertained Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, a Solamnic Knight who had ridden up to our backwater estate in the glittering armor that was already the subject of song and a legend or two. To top it off, Sir Bayard was supposedly the best swordsman in northern Solamnia.

Not that I cared.

What was especially galling about our visitor was his redemption of Alfric. For it seems that Bayard Brightblade was on his way to vie for the hand of some southern nobleman’s daughter in some glorified tournament, and had stopped in our rice paddy of a county as a favor to our once famous father. Bayard was taking my brother on as a squire at the advanced age of twenty-one, where half a dozen Knights had balked and refused. He would take Alfric with him, whip him into shape, and return him to Father as a man with knightly prospects.

Hearing of these prospects, Alfric had decided to celebrate: another horse had been found dead of exhaustion in the stables this morning, and once again, our tutor Gilean-dos had been set on fire. Arson was a hobby both Alfric and I pursued, but as usual, I had been blamed, dismissed from the hall without ceremony and supper, while a celebrity dined in our midst.

Laughter and the clatter of crockery arose from downstairs as I dusted my brother’s nightstand, passing the cloth over the freshly carved “Alfric was here” on its surface. No doubt they Were talking about me over wine and venison downstairs, hoping I would soon grow out of whatever I was supposed to grow out of. Brithelm, my middle and spiritual brother, had been excused from supper once again that evening for the gods knew what ancient and honorable fast, and Alfric was no doubt seated at the right hand of my father, nodding in agreement with the old man who had done his best by all of us, while Sir Bayard looked on in solemn and knightly approval.

I stewed over the festivities as I swept cinders, more bones, more feathers. But the stewing—not to mention my story—had only begun.

As I crawled beneath the bed to finish the sweeping before turning to the window I had to scrub daily, I heard a noise behind me in the doorway of the chamber. My first thought was that Alfric had enjoyed scarcely enough bullying for the evening, and had excused himself politely from the table in order to sprint upstairs and whale the daylights out of me for the sheer joy of daylights-whaling. I paused amidst broken pottery, empty wine bottles, several spent oil lamps, and more bones, and crouched beneath the bed.

A voice—honeyed and musical and deep—flowed out of the doorway.

“Where is everyone, little one beneath the bed? You needn’t hide, for I can see through the dark, through time and stone and metal, and I know where you are. Where is everyone? I have business in this house.”

Within that voice was also steel and danger. I thought of assassins, of the hired killer who speaks with a voice as sweet as a choir’s, as the soft sound of the cello, even while he draws the dagger or pours the poison. What was more, in the presence of the visitor, I swear that the lights dimmed in the chamber, that a low mist rose from the floor. The temperature dropped until the rising mist was laced with a white and bitter ice. More frightened than when I had thought it was only my brother intending to batter me senseless, I answered in the way I thought safest, to render the least harm to the most dear.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but don’t hurt me. I’m way down the line to inherit the fortune of this place, so I’m not even worth a well-planned kidnap. If you’re looking for Father, he’s downstairs at a banquet, but you’d probably have an excellent shot at him coming up the stairs in the wee hours of the morning. By the way, he had a hunting accident six months back, still favors his left leg, so aim toward the right.” I began to weep, blubber, and expand on the subject.

“Or if it’s my brother Brithelm you’re after, he’s probably meditating in his room—some kind of religious holiday. Down the hall, third door on the left.”

Brithelm was harmless, good-natured, and of all the family and guests I liked him the best. But not enough to place myself in the way of a would-be murderer. Quickly I continued the list.

“The only other soul on the floor is our tutor Gileandos, who won’t hear a thing, since he’s recovering from burns and probably from brandy by this time of night.”

Through these betrayals, I stayed beneath the bed, from where I could see the intruder from the knees down, first standing in the doorway, then entering the room and seating himself in a chair by the window. His legs seemed large through the bend of the glass globe of the discarded lamp, and he wore black boots tooled with silver scorpions, as though black boots alone were not sinister enough. I raked a fortress of bones and crockery and lint about me, sliding closer and closer to the wall against which the far side of Alfric’s bed rested.

“Of course, you’re aware I have an older brother Alfric, too. If you’d like his entire schedule for the next several days, and a list of his favorite foods . . .”

“But, little one,” interrupted the stranger, his singer’s voice a lullaby, a drug. “I intend no harm to you or your family. Not unless it is necessary, of course. For it is another I am searching for . . .”

“Oh, you mean Sir Bayard. Well, if you are after his life it would be better if you came back later, after we’re all asleep, after even the servants have gone to bed. That way the whole business would be cleaner, more private. You wouldn’t have to kill anyone else to do whatever it is you want to do.”

“Don’t you listen, child?” The voice grew lower still, almost a whisper, and the air turned even colder. Outside, the nightingales ceased their singing, as though the moat house and everything surrounding it lay hush to catch the murmured words of the visitor. “Are you that in love with the sound of your own voice? I tell you that I seek no man’s life.”

I raised myself onto my elbows, stirring up a cloud of dust beneath the bed, which I dearly hoped would hide my thoughts and trembling as well as my whereabouts.

Quietly the gentleman in black began to explain himself, as the fire in the hearth sank lower and lower.

“I have no designs on lives tonight. Not tonight, oh, no. It is only the armor I seek, little one, the fabled armor of Sir Bayard of Vingaard, renowned Solamnic Knight of the Sword, who rests here in this house this evening, or so I understand. Oh, yes, only the armor, a small price to pay, don’t you think, for the continued safety of those you love so dearly?”

Well, to be honest, those I loved so dearly were mostly under the bed. And if I wept from fear before, I was practically weeping with joy, with relief now, there amidst the rubble. For my visitor was merely a small time thief—a burglar. A kindred spirit.

I would have crawled from beneath the bed to kiss those silver scorpions, that black instep, had I thought I served to benefit further by adoration, by thief worship. But I feared that sudden movement was still unwise. Instead I lay there, wondering what he wanted with Sir Bayard’s armor.

It was only a moment before he read my silence. He stirred in the chair. The room grew even colder.

“As I said. It is only the armor that interests me, little Galen, nor should you concern yourself with what use I have for it.” I thought of the fine Solamnic breastplate, greaves, and helmet which stood, poorly polished by my eldest brother, in the huge mahogany closet of the guest chambers.

The intruder was welcome to it. I had other worries.

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh . . . that need not concern you, either. I bear you no ill will-” All the while I was listening for the sound of approaching footsteps on the stairway, in the hall.

“Well, if the armor is all you’re after, it’s yours for the asking. It’s in the great mahogany closet of the guest chambers. Welcome to it.”

“Ah!” said the voice.

“The problem is, the guest chambers are locked, triply locked—bolt upon bolt upon bolt. And my brother Alfric has the keys. I expect you’ll have to break the door down or pick the complex series of locks, but the second would take too long and the first would alarm the whole house . . .”

“But my little friend, I have an alternative,” he stated, musically, the worn heels of his boots visible as he leaned back farther in the chair. And in the cold air was the smell of smoke and of sweat and of old blood. “I love alternatives.”

Something told me that this was no representative burglar, that I was in over my head. Then a movement—silent, as quick as a striking adder—and a small leather bag hurtled through the air and landed by my side. I shifted uncomfortably, tugged at the drawstring. Into the dim light tumbled half a dozen shimmering stones—onyx, perhaps, or black opals. Perhaps a dark jade. In the shadows beneath the bed, it was hard to tell. They were cool and slick in the palm of my hand, clicking seductively together and against the band of my naming ring.

“For your troubles, little Galen,” the voice soothed. Something in that gave me the shudders. The intruder continued.

“I shall return to this castle at midnight, at which time I expect to walk without hindrance to the guest chambers and find the armor awaiting me. From that moment on, we shall be done with each other.

“If, however, you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, or if you break the silence to which I enjoin you this night, this moment—if indeed you break that silence to anyone, or speak of me aloud to the walls of your bedchamber on this or any other night. . . I shall have no choice but to dance in your skin, little boy.”

I ignored the threat at first. After all, I was caught up in marveling at the glittering objects in my hand, and in reckoning how much bargaining power they would get me with the merchants in the village, who despite my promises and pleas and threats had begun to deny me credit.

Upon such reckonings the gods lay heavy trouble.

For lulled by greed, I extended my hand out from under the bed so that the stones might catch better light. Green and yellow they were, with a dappling of deep red . . . And was grabbed by the black-gloved hand of the intruder.

I was startled at first, then worse than startled, as the hot pain of his grip shot up my arm like a quick-acting poison in the arteries. It seemed as though the bed was spinning above me, and dizzily I struggled for purchase, for balance in a rapidly blurring room. The grip relaxed, and just as I began to breathe readily again, a tickling and scratching on my throbbing hand took my breath once more.

For a truly real scorpion stood perched in the palm of my hand, dark amid the bright jewels, tail coiled and poised to strike.

I almost fainted, but the honeyed voice alerted me, jogged me back to my senses.

“Something tells me you aren’t paying me the proper . . . attention, little man. Oh, but let me correct any misgivings on your part, any tendency you have toward underestimating me here at our first encounter. For I want a certain honesty between us. Even scorpions play by the rules, though the rules may be their own.”

The creature on my arm stood deathly still, as though it was an ebony brooch. A brooch with a poison pin. The room, the voice, the whole world seemed to focus in the clammy stillness of my palm.

“And the rules in this transaction are simple ones. Your complete cooperation. Your total silence. Your willingness to come when I call and never to question the mysteries of my workings.

“For this you receive your life daily. Of course, we shall take stock of your doings, now and then, to see if you have played by the rules or have been . . . found wanting. Death is a cozy nest, boy. You might even grow to prefer it.”

The scorpion vanished from my hand. I closed my fist rapidly, spilling semiprecious stones across the floor. When the clattering died down, when the last stone had rolled to a halt under the intruder’s chair, he rose, his boots glinting ebony in the firelight.

“Remember, Galen Pathwarden. The scorpion returns as quickly as it departs, as unexpectedly. But we will take stock, at midnight, in the guest quarters of the moat house. At that hour, the armor is mine. Or you are.”

Suddenly the boots stood before the chair, the intruder using it as a step to rise to the sill of the window and out, down three dizzying stories into the gathering dark, the shutters of the window creaking back and forth behind him. I knew from experience that it would still be safer underneath the bed. Above me I heard movement, creaking, a servant climbing the steps to the bell tower, and soon afterwards, the ten tolls of the bell that signaled the hour.

There followed a long pause in which the air in the chambers began to warm, the sound of bird’s song outside the window resumed, and I finally ceased shaking, crawled out into the light, and lay sprawled on the floor for a moment, recovering my breath amidst a litter of dark opals.

For dark opals they were, and a sizable bribe for my efforts and silence. I gathered them up, inspecting them for flaws. The Scorpion, as I decided to call him in honor of both his companions and his wardrobe, was evidently a man of his word.

Which gave me pause, naturally. For a man who keeps his word in one venue . . . Is likely to keep it in others.

I sprang to my feet and out the door of Alfric’s quarters, leaving behind me the room half-swept, the windows open, and the fireplace heavy with ashes. Down the narrow granite stairwell I rushed, touching perhaps two steps on my way to the second floor, landing heavily, off balance, then recovering in stride on my way to the door of the guest chambers.

Which was triply locked. Bolt upon bolt upon bolt.

And the keys dangling from Alfric’s belt in the main hall somewhere, no doubt ringing together as pleasantly as sleigh bells while their bearer’s little brother awaited midnight and the dancing in his skin. I drew out my knife and began gouging at the upper lock.

There I might have stayed, whimpering and gouging until the hour of reckoning, growing more frantic and more defeated as the minutes passed. But luck—Weasel’s luck, as Alfric called my ability to fall in a midden and come up smelling like jasmine—stepped in after a long absence.

I heard the sound of someone ascending the stairs toward Alfric’s quarters. From the heavy tread and the puffing and muttering, I knew that my brother had been paying court to the wine while Father and Sir Bayard had been distracted by nobility and conversation.

Hulking like an ogre, smelling of pork and port, Brother Alfric paused, reeling, on the second floor landing. Shading his eyes with one meaty hand, he squinted down the hall in my direction.

“You again, Weasel? I just saw you on the stairway.”

By the way, he calls me Weasel, if you haven’t guessed. “Galen” means “Weasel” in Old Solamnic, and Alfric has other reasons—unfair reasons—of his own.

“The old gallon distemper,” I explained, referring to his wine-slanted vision. “How is your guest enjoying his stay?” I continued, my voice full of sweetness and brotherly affection—as best I could imitate, at least. But it had dawned on Alfric that I was hovering about the guest chambers door in a way that I should not be hovering. Lumbering up the hall he came, his fists clenched, promising mayhem.

“What was you trying to do to that lock, little brother?”

“I’m not here, Alfric. You just saw me on the stairway, remember? What you see before you is a resinous vision, the dregs of the wine.”

I never claimed to have planned this all too well. But he stopped at that and puzzled it out for a moment. Meanwhile I scrambled to my feet, backed away from him, and kept talking.

“Brother dear, even as I speak there are mysteries milling about this moat house, endangering all of us.”

It sounded good.

“Endangering you above all others. For you are to be the squire of a certain reputable Knight whose . . . belongings may be at jeopardy this very evening.”

Alfric paused in his unsteady charge, hiccupped, and stared at me in stupid puzzlement. If he came after me, he would have the stones—and probably the whole story—in an instant. Would probably drub me senseless in exchange.

My visitor would return, would find the the armor still locked away behind a door thrice bolted. Would ask for his stones back, which I would not have.

Would dance in my skin.

I kept talking, quickly, desperately, dancing through memory, through invention, through downright lies.

“Brother, only now when I was at the finishing touches to your quarters . . . there flitted a dark shape in and out of the shadows in the courtyard.”

“A servant?” Alfric had stopped, panting and leaning against the wall of the corridor. His ragged red hair clung sweatily to his forehead: when Sir Bayard had sworn to whip him into shape, the noble Solamnic had admitted it was “a monstrous undertaking.”

“Servants don’t flit in and out of shadows, Alfric. Burglars do.”

“Burglars?”

“And what is there around this backwater moat house worth the burgling?”

Alfric stared at me questioningly.

“Sir Bayard’s armor, damn it!” I shouted, then lowered my voice, afraid that the noise would carry downstairs. “Coming down to get you would have raised a stir, perhaps for nothing. But I had to know that the armor was safe, especially since it had been entrusted to my dear brother’s safekeeping, and if he lost it. . . well, his squirehood—your squirehood, Alfric—would be delayed even longer than . . . ill fortune . . .”

“And politics . . . ,” Alfric interrupted, sliding down the corridor wall to a sitting position.

“And politics . . . have delayed it already.”

I could not resist reminding him that a twenty-one-year-old squire was a bit grotesque, like our ancient tutor Gilean-dos sending flowers, sonnets, and scandalous proposals to Elspeth, our twenty-year-old milkmaid.

“You expect me to believe that? Expect me to believe that even if there is a burglar, he could get in past them locks and all our servants and the dogs?”

“Look at our servants, Alfric. Look at our dogs. This castle is wide open to any secondstory man who crawls out of our own private swamp down the road. The servants themselves are always complaining of missing pennies, missing baubles and beads.”

“Some of that’s you, Galen.”

“And some you. But we both know our petty thievery doesn’t add up around here. There’s more that slips through the cracks than slips through the cracks, if you catch my meaning.”

I’m not sure he did, but his dimwitted face fell.

“About this burglar?”

“Outside before the bell struck ten.”

“A dark shape?”

“Flitting in and out of the shadows, Alfric. A burglar if I ever saw one.”

My eldest brother curled up on the floor of the hall, jamming his head between his knees.

“Oh, little brother! What shall I do?”

This was better. I looked at Alfric, then down to the window at the opposite end of the hall. Outside I could hear the call of a cuckoo as it settled somewhere for the night—probably in another bird’s nest, where it would lay its egg and fly on under cover of darkness, as the old legends said, leaving its young to the kindness of a robin, a nightingale, one of the pretty singers who would raise the croaking infant as its own.

“All isn’t lost, Alfric. After all, the armor may still be in the room.”

He looked up at me hopefully, his big gap-toothed grin awash in the torchlight. I thanked the gods that the brains that ran in the family had never run after him.

“So first of all, we should check to see that the armor is there.”

I looked back to the door, and in a sudden rush Alfric was on me. I was slammed against the wall and hung there, feet dangling helplessly in the corridor. A strong hand gripped my throat, another tangled less than lovingly in my hair.

“You better not be up to nothing, Weasel.”

I began to weep, flatter, lie.

“Please, please, Brother, don’t throttle the baby of the family! I know you’re a good man, you’re going to be a fine squire and an even finer Knight! Remember, Father had younger brothers, all of whom survived well into adulthood! He’s come to consider that a family tradition.”

Alfric took the hint. His grip slackened, and I took courage.

“Of course I’m not up to anything. No need to borrow trouble, Brother. The worry and the confusion and the running around headless will come soon enough if there’s no armor in this room.”

Alfric let me drop and was on his knees by the door in a moment, knife in hand and gouging where I had left off gouging.

“Alfric?”

“Shut up, Weasel.” The irritating and frantic sound of metal on metal as the knife slid through the lock. I looked down the hall. Nobody there.

“Alfric, the reason you’re so essential in this is that you have the keys to the room on your belt.”

After fumbling with keys and locks for a while, we gained entry to the guest chambers which tonight were to house the most ingenious of Solamnic swordsman. It was the most richly appointed room in the moat house, Father being a zealot about hospitality: each wall was hung with tapestries, the enormous bed was covered with goose down blankets, and the fire blazed cheerily.

It was not a room for misdeed.

Alfric charged in ahead of me, lurching in a drunken panic toward the standing closet; I hovered behind him, thinking frantically of explanations I could summon if Sir Bayard Brightblade were to walk in the door and find us burrowing in his belongings.

Thinking frantically of how I might proceed from here.

Alfric stumbled once, grabbed the doors of the closet, and pulled. Of course they were locked. Of course the key was on the ring at his belt, and of course he had forgotten it, too, in the anxiety and wine. Inside the closet, the armor rattled like a ghost in an old story.

You can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention. It all added up—the recklessness, the jostling, the heavy armor in the closet. After my brother had fumbled with the keys a long and distressing moment, one fit into the lock. With his considerable brute strength, Alfric yanked at the door, which flew open readily.

Bringing with it Sir Bayard Brightblade’s extraordinarily heavy breastplate.

Which, when it made contact with my brother’s head, set up a ringing that might well have disturbed my father and Bayard in their Solamnic discussions downstairs, and upstairs might have roused Brithelm from his meditations and Gileandos from his stupor.

But it did none of these. It did nothing, in fact, except lay out my brother on the floor of the guest chambers. The ringing of metal on the rocklike substance of my brother’s head was lost in the ringing from the bell tower. As I said, you can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention.

“Look out, Alfric,” I said, quietly and in gratitude, as the eleventh bell tolled.

The rest was uncertainty, waiting alone in the guest chambers for the hour before the intruder returned and the armor changed hands. Outside all the birds were still silent, except for the nightingale, who sang merrily while I lingered and stewed.

I cast the red dice I kept always beside me to determine fortune. I rolled nine and nine, tunnel on tunnel for the Sign of the Weasel—great fortune, considering my nickname—though had I remembered the second line that went with the dice spots, I should have been less secure.

So I waited until the tower bell began to toll once more, steeling myself for the return of the intruder. At the seventh ring I heard something outside in the hall—down by the window, as if someone were climbing through. The acrobatics alone were impressive.

I scuttled toward the bed, ready to dive beneath it should the Scorpion fellow be less the man of his word than he allowed. But a groaning behind me brought me up short.

There was a knot in the miracle. For my brother was waking at midnight, to the gods knew what mayhem. That is when the helmet occured to me. It lay beside the breastplate on the floor, slightly dirty because of Alfric’s lack of squirely attention, but impressive nonetheless, with its intricate weavings of inlay, copper and silver and brass.

Footsteps approached up the hall toward the guest room, as my brother stirred toward wakefulness and, of course, toward my ruin.

There was no time to deliberate. I snatched up the helmet as I rushed to my brother’s side, and raising it above me, brought the whole damned artifact—visor and crown and plume, iron and copper and silver and brass—crashing down upon his forehead. Again the sound of the impact was lost in the bells. Alfric grunted and fell back upon the floor, where he lay still.

My panic subsided. My reason returned. For a long minute I stood in dismay above my brother, thinking that the murder for which I had shown promise those five years ago on the moat house battlements had now come to pass.

There was a movement at the door. I did not turn but dove toward the bed. A strong hand grasped my ankle and dragged me into the center of the room, where I lay shivering and bleating. Behind me I could hear the Scorpion lift the armor in a quick, fluid, almost effortless movement. And again came the voice—still soft, still poisonous.

“You have done passably well, little one, though the violence with which you concluded was a bit . . . untidy.”

I looked around. A black, hooded figure moved to the door, the heavy suit of armor slung over its shoulder like a bundle of sticks or a blanket. Then it stopped and turned.

The red glow of the eyes shot through me like the grip that had pained and poisoned me scarcely two hours past.

“Your ring.”

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“Your naming ring, little man.” And the gloved hand stretched forth, palm extended. “You see, we are bound together by more than . . . a gentleman’s agreement, shall we say? I would be more content—indeed, more comfortable—with some token of our transactions in hand.”

“Not my naming ring!”

“Oh, but you can have the stones back, sir. They’re certainly worth more than this little copper ring, and, after all, they were yours in the first place.”

The intruder stood silently, gloved palm extended. Reluctantly I removed the ring, copper but intricately carved—one of a kind. It had been given to me four years ago, on the night of my thirteenth birthday when I had passed into the rather sorry manhood I had now botched up even more by dealing with some sort of armor-craving villain.

If anything identified a Solamnic youth, it was his naming ring.

I tossed the ring to the Scorpion. It disappeared with a flicker of his gloved hand.

“By the way,” he murmured, “I still hold you to the rest of your bargain. Not a word of this to anyone, for on the night you speak that word I shall hear of it. . . no matter where I am. Perhaps that very night your skin will come due. Perhaps another night. But it will be soon, oh, yes, very soon.” And quickly, stepping over a slowly stirring Alfric, he was out the door.

Someone—perhaps a servant—raised the alarm, and I stood there at a loss, hoping that stalwarts such as my father, such as the incomparable Bayard Brightblade, could harness the character in black boots before he slipped back into darkness with the armor and his plans for my skin. I had no idea how swift and efficient the intruder was, how the armor would have vanished, and he with it, by the time that Father, by now burdened with wine, and Sir Bayard, cold sober but burdened with Father, had climbed the stairs to a belated rescue.

Chapter Two

I did not know how the countryside would take it, what the farmers and peasants would say when my visitor, now disguised in the armor he had taken from Sir Bayard, began to turn the villages near our moat house into his own private fief. However, marauding never played well in the rural areas—the demands for tribute and cheeses, for livestock to be slaughtered and roasted on the spot. The demands for money and for daughters. Though for what purpose this disguise and rampage, I could not say.

The very day after the armor was stolen, peasants began to arrive at the moat house to petition my father. Each one bore his hat in hand, and each one suggested, simply and humbly at first, that “the Master do something about the troubles in our village.”

The “something” suggested was usually that Father draw and quarter the offending knight, placing various parts of his anatomy “upon a platter” (what part of the anatomy depended upon the peasant’s imagination).

“If the Master wills it, there’s a lot of us what would like to see the culprit’s head set before us on a silver platter.”

“If it would not take too much of the good Master’s time and trouble, the wronged people of Oak Hollow would fancy dearly the sight of those thieving fingers set in a row on a bronze platter.”

“Oh, that his heart was pulsing on a copper dish beside the well in my back yard!”

And onward, as each tried to outdo his neighbor, as the simple folk descended to bodily parts I had never heard of, until I wondered what they thought about besides torture while they worked their fields. Father listened only halfheartedly, his attention, no doubt, on the negligence of his boys. He was an old style Solamnic Knight, all stern and strict to the Code and the Measure. That any guest would be robbed beneath his roof was enough to send him into paroxysms and assure that Alfric would be placed under house arrest for his negligence—and confined to the moat house “until further notice.”

Moreover, the ransacked guest was Sir Bayard Brightblade, one of the most promising Knights in northern Ansalon, whose swordsmanship and bravery (and good sense, evidently) had been rumor even as far to the north as here in our godforsaken, backwater estate in the middle of Coastlund (which was northwest of the Vingaard Mountains and southeast of nowhere). Bayard was quietly, politely stewing, no doubt vexed at the delay that kept him at our estate when he would much rather be on his way to Solamnia, where he could batter the heads of younger men in a contest for a girl he had yet to meet, if what I was hearing was true. That was probably why I was being punished, too.

For on that night that now seemed ages ago, the black-booted intruder out the door, Alfric face down in the closet, and Father and Bayard approaching rapidly up the stairs, I was forced to think quickly. I would draw too many questions if I stood unharmed at the scene of the struggle. Far better to blend into the scenery.

I lowered my head and ran into the oaken door of Alfric’s chambers.

As a result, mine was the first body the Knights found lying in the room, the first they revived. And of course I knew nothing, and only moaned pathetically while Father rushed to my eldest brother, pulled him by the ankles into the center of the room, and slapped him awake.

It was my first real look at Sir Bayard Brightblade. And he passed muster.

Here was a man a full head taller than my father, and a good deal thinner; darker; moustached; thirty at the youngest but not forty yet; long hair, shoulder-length, in the Solamnic style of that time; a calm upon his countenance—his face like a handsome but expressionless mask, as though it were carved on a monument in an old landscape where there was nothing but rock and sun.

Bayard regarded me only briefly, then looked meaningfully at my father, who scolded me bluntly, groggily.

“Never mind the fanfare, Galen. Tell us what happened.”

Alfric was still stirring below us. He groaned, and Father glanced anxiously his way. I began the story rapidly.

The two Knights heard the same story as had my hapless brother—of the flitting, shadowy shape outside the window, of my concern for our guest. That in my concern for Sir Bayard’s belongings I had tried the door of the guest chambers, finding it locked, and enlisted my brother’s help as he passed by.

“So it was all with the best of intentions, Sir Bayard, that my brother and I came into this room. In our concern, perhaps we did not notice the felon in question as he sneaked up behind us from a dark notch in the hallway, or . . .” and I paused meaningfully, hoping to cast a fly into Alfric’s soup, “. . .or perhaps he was already hiding in your room, allowed in there by a previous oversight.”

I paused, let that settle, and continued. “Whatever way, I’m not sure. But I turned for a moment at a noise in the hallway, then back to see a black-hooded form looming over my fallen brother. Whoever it was moved quickly. He was on me before I could gather myself, before I could see anything clearly.

“The next thing I know is that you’re waking me and I’m lying here by the doorway and Alfric face first in the wardrobe and . . . I’m feeling a little faint now. Father.”

I lay back in mock exhaustion. Alfric grunted on the floor beside me.

“I do hope,” I sighed, “that my dear Brother is intact.”

Intact enough to wait another decade for his squire’s spurs.

Within the next several days, things changed around the moat house—things that I noticed from the first but the others dismissed as bad climate brought about by a sudden switch in the weather. From the moment the birds hushed their singing on the night of the banquet, there remained a certain absence in the air: where you might expect the song of the nightingale, the quarrel of jays, the flapping and gurgling of pigeons, there was now only silence, and eventually it occurred to me that even though it was still high summer the birds had gone, perhaps to a warmer climate to await the passing of winter.

Because of the time of year, we expected summer—light and heat, and the smothering damp rising from the notorious swamps scarcely a mile from our walls—but the weather was acting otherwise. In the morning we would wake to the stiffness of frost on the grounds and the trees shedding leaves prematurely. We had trouble keeping the fires lit, much less the candles, as though all light and heat were being siphoned away. Gileandos had studied with gnomes. He almost always ignored the obvious, preferring to notice something subtle, hidden in a situation, from which he almost always drew the wrong conclusion. When he noticed the departure of birds, the sudden drop in temperature around the moat house, he blamed events on “the precipitous action of sunspots upon marsh vapors.”

I recall him now, staring absentmindedly through his telescope directly into the face of the sun, so that when he turned from his stargazing he no doubt saw sunspots that were never there in the first place. He was at least sixty years old, but had no doubt been stooped and graying for years, all jewelry and combed beard and slick pomades and colognes—a dandy gone nightmarishly wrong in his declining years. But to this appearance he was adding a peculiarly haunted look of late, as the gallons of gin caught up to him. He taught us poetry and history. Mathematics, too, until the day Alfric fainted from exhaustion in class. He also taught heraldry and rhetoric and Solamnic lore—a jack of all trades he was, lukewarm in all disciplines and running scared of sources of heat and light.

Which is why, as usual, I paid his explanation no mind, preoccupied as he was with conjecture and rumor and superstition. Instead, I cast the Calantina, the red dice from Estwilde, and received four times running the five and the ten, steam on earth, the Sign of the Viper. I consulted the books in Gileandos’s library, read all the commentaries on the augury, but afterwards I knew no more of the mystery than I had before. In the meantime everyone was worked up about the events of the banquet night. Bayard, armed only with borrowed leather jerkin, shield, and sword, was ready to set out in pursuit of the thief, if only he could locate him. He was upset at the delays to his tournament plans, but being by nature a lenient sort, he still intended to take his squire with him, even though Alfric had been caught nodding while the armor changed hands. Father, on the other hand, brooded over Alfric’s part in the theft.

Father was not a lenient sort.

“Bayard, is the penalty for armorial neglect still death by hanging, or has the Order grown soft in the years since my retirement?”

I remember this word for word, set to memory as I stifled a cough from the ash and old smoke. You see, there were secret passages in the moat house, passages Father had either forgotten or never knew about in the first place, that Brithelm was too spiritual and Alfric too stupid to discover. They were there, nonetheless, perfect for a boy accustomed to escapes, to dodging responsibility and punishment. I was especially fond of the entrance to the great hall concealed handily in the back of the fireplace, from where I listened to Father and Bayard.

“Not soft, Sir Andrew, as much as understanding that squires or would-be squires can make mistakes.” I could see him lean forward in his chair, hear the leather jerkin creak and crackle as he paused for emphasis. The armor was too short for him and would have made him look comical were it not for those gray eyes and impassive face that silenced all comedy. “No,” he continued, “nowadays the Order tends toward leniency, nor am I all so sure that is wrong.”

So it was not to be hanging. Very well. There were always accidents upon the road—bandits, hostile centaurs, even the peasants themselves, who for generations had not been altogether fond of the Order—something to do with the Cataclysm, Gileandos said, though the Cataclysm happened almost two hundred years ago.

The peasants had long memories, evidently.

At any rate, our local swains would welcome any excuse to waylay any Solamnic Knight who passed through their farmlands. Or so we in the castle had been told.

“I see it as a boyish error,” Bayard continued, scratching the ear of one of our innumerable dogs that had crawled over to sit beneath his chair. Bayard raised his hand to underscore the point; the dog beside him, conditioned by its years in the moat house, flinched and whimpered.

“But don’t forget. Bayard, that the ‘boy’ you speak of is twenty-one years old,” Father growled, his huge hands tightening on the cane he used when the colder mornings brought back the pain to his leg, recalling the hunting disaster of last winter. “And Alfric, as you know by now, isn’t the brightest of youngsters.”

Bayard hid a smile politely and nodded. Father never noticed, his eyes on the floor in front of him.

“Let’s face it, he tends toward being oafish and petty and not altogether pleasant. He’s twenty-one, Sir Bayard, no boy, and not liable to grow out of such things.

“Had he any appeal or decency as a child, he would have been a Knight by now. Had he been a peasant, he might well have been responsible for a wife and several children.”

And had he been a dog or a horse, he would have been long dead, past causing trouble. My hiding place was too cramped. I shifted my position, but in doing so scraped my belt against stone, making a sound I could swear they had heard in Palanthas, in Pax Tharkas, at the ends of the world. I held my breath and waited.

Bayard leaned back in his chair, glanced smoothly and quickly my way. I was sure he had noticed me. But immediately he turned back to Father, who was droning on as if nothing had happened.

“All I am saying, Bayard,” the old man continued, “is that by twenty-one Alfric should have put away ‘boyish error.’ By his age I was a Knight of the Sword, held with a small band the Paths of Chaktamir, waded to my knees in the blood of the men of Neraka . . .”

“And those, Sir Andrew, were special times, in which special men were the actors,” Bayard responded smoothly, respectfully. “I’ve heard tales of your doings at Chaktamir. That is why I believe that, regardless of how little promise they have shown, there may be merit yet in a son of yours. After all, blood will tell in such things.”

Father reddened behind the graying red of his beard, never one to accept a compliment easily.

“Damn it, Sir Bayard, I wanted these boys to have their ticket out of Northern Coastlund, here at the swampy end of the world. Get ’em down into Solamnia, into adventure and swordplay and righting wrongs and all. My middle son’s some kind of . . . monk, and the youngest has all the markings of a miscreant . . .”

Bayard glanced quickly in my direction.

“You judge them harshly because of your high standards,” he suggested, but Father wasn’t buying.

“And the oldest. . . a surly lump in my larder. It’s enough to make an old man rampage.”

“My offer still stands, Sir Andrew,” Bayard replied, a bit impatiently. “A son of yours—I say now, any son—as my squire. He’ll find me a resourceful teacher.” He leaned back and steepled his fingers, turning ever so slightly to face the fireplace.

I shrank into the stonework of the chimney, back in the safe and ashy gloom. It was there that I suddenly had other problems. A rat, awakened or flushed from hiding by my adventures in the tunnel, scuttled across my foot and huddled, half-terrified, in the dark corner of the fireplace. I yelped, leaped, and hit my head against brick and blackened stone, showering myself in ash and cinders.

It was then, naturally, that the dog came barreling toward my hiding place, sure that he had cornered something wild and perhaps edible. I reached out with my foot, kicked the rat into the path of the oncoming dog, and scrambled up into the passageway, the sound of snarls, shouts, and last desperate squeals fading behind me as I slid into the closet of my room, changed my sooty, incriminating clothes for an innocent nightshirt, and slipped into bed, filling the late morning and the empty wing of the castle with the sound of false snoring.

The discussion continued in my absence, the two Knights reaching the worst possible decision. Father was convinced that the burglar had ambushed us from inside the room, let in by Alfric’s complete inattention. Despite Bayard’s assertion that Alfric required understanding. Father passed sentence rapidly and angrily.

Big Brother was to seethe about under house arrest, confined within the walls of the moat house. From there, unlike the end of a rope or the depths of a dungeon, he could quite possibly savage my person with one of any number of available weapons.

For it was Alfric’s opinion that I should have spoken out—should have taken the blame for the whole mishap.

Such is the ingratitude of brothers.

Needless to say, it unsettled me these days to hear my brother’s footsteps coming up the hall. Alfric was surly, blaming me cloudily for the theft of the armor, though the wine and the blow on the head had made him hazy as to what happened that fateful night.

Haziness, however, never stayed his fist or his well-aimed foot. So I would hide for hours in the secret tunnels and alcoves, cowering in ashes and occasionally booting rats to a curious dog, for I knew that of all creatures in the moat house, I was in the greatest danger. I wore disguises, once passing quite effectively for a chimney sweep. When I was not masked or hidden, I put on the face of innocence, doubled my efforts at my chores, and kept close to either Father or Brithelm.

I always kept my hands in my pockets, so that nobody would ask what had become of my naming ring. I was reduced to keeping company with Brithelm, and listening to his speculations on the gods. I tried not to fall asleep.

“Galen, what about the nature of prophecy?” he would ask, feeding the birds in the moat house courtyard, benign smile on his face and red hair askew over a patched red robe, looking for all the world like some outrageous scarlet fowl that had taken up with the pigeons and the ground doves.

“I don’t know, Brithelm. Watch out for that trough.”

At the last moment my brother stepped around certain immersion, still casting corn on the ground and whistling to himself.

“I mean, prophecy is a hall of mirrors, one reflecting on another and all reflecting back to the eye at the center of watching.”

“You know, you’re right, Brithelm. Don’t step on the dog.”

“These birds, Galen,” Brithelm mused, stepping over a terrier sleeping in the shadow of the trough. The dog paddled its feet, running in dreams.

“In the Age of Light the clerics foretold disaster by following the formations of birds on the wing. Sometimes in my sanctuary . . .”

“Back in Warden Swamp? I’ve heard that it’s overgrown and that a full cypress tree can grow there in a matter of weeks; the air is so humid that man-eating fish fly through it in search of their prey.”

Brithelm paused, looked straight at me while he kept on walking toward the cistern. I took him by the arm, steered him gently toward the stairway that mounted the south wall of our little run-down fortress.

“One man’s swamp . . . ,” he began, and laughed gently, tossing a final handful of corn toward a pursuing band of pigeons, “is another’s hermitage. Sometimes in the mornings there are a dozen quail you can see in the open, little brother. They’ll eat out of your hand. And there are dark things, too, but the legends magnify them.

“So birds are the most famous of auguries. Then there are leaves, the unruffled pool of water where you stare until you see beyond the reflections . . .”

Such was the time I spent in pure malarkey, while the eldest brother plotted and schemed, whined and pleaded, though he never could remember enough to fix me with the blame for anything. Still, he bent the old man’s ear with conjecture. After a morning in superstition with Brithelm, I often caught Father scowling at me suspiciously from the head of the table at lunch, while Alfric scowled at me over bottles and venison from his seat of disgrace at the far end of the hall. It was like being caught between mirrors.

So it went, with Father angry at Alfric’s negligence and growing suspicious of me, though the evidence never seemed to come in. Bayard, too, seemed to lose his good humor as the moat house hung for weeks in ominous suspension.

It was not until we heard of the killing that Father lost his temper completely. Another group of peasants came to the moat house, a crowd this time, bearing the worst news so far. It was shortly after dawn. Bayard had already left on his daily search for the rampaging armor thief, but the peasants caught Father throwing the dogs out of his chair in the great hall so that he might hold audience in dignity. The oldest of the peasants, a woman of eighty if she were a day, dressed in a homespun mantle against the unnatural cold, and grayed and warted like a storybook witch, was their appointed speaker. And she wasted no time, launching into her speech before the last mastiff hit the floor howling.

“It was like this, Your Knightship, and may the gods strike me and my children unto five generations if every word I speak is not the truth.”

Red-faced and puffing, Father sat down, and put on his most interested look. I tried to guess where celestial lightning would first strike when the old harpy lied, as they always did, as she surely would.

“I tremble to tell this, Your Knightship, but there has been murder on your lands, murder most foul and unspeakable. Murder at the hands of one of your own order.”

She was good. Father gripped his chair in outrage. Brithelm was already standing by the fireplace, and stifled a cry of dismay. On the other hand, Alfric and I remained seated. Alfric sharpened his dagger meaningfully, while I buried my nose in a book I was not reading.

I was listening all the while. But I cannot say that the old woman’s lament “opened my eyes to the sad plight of the peasants,” as laments are supposed to do for anyone with a speck of nobility in his soul. I knew full well that the poor led lives filled with sorrows that never touched upon ours.

In all honesty, that was the way I preferred it.

For it seemed that whenever those lives did touch ours, it set off Father, and his sons reaped the whirlwind. I slumped behind the table as the old bat continued serenely, already caught up in her story of gloom and random violence. If I was lucky it would be Alfric who would harvest the big trouble. My oldest brother, heir to all the holdings, sat there and wiped his nose on his sleeve, unaware that he stood poised on even harder times. A bulldog, taking the silence as a good sign, crept back into the room and begged for bacon by my chair.

“It is a terrible tale I bring you,” the old bag droned on. “Yesterday, as the evening came on, a man on horseback, wearing the armor of Solamnia, rode up to the house of my nephew Jaffa. You remember Jaffa, Your Knightship? The one what lost an ear to your eldest boy in that quarrel over the taxes last year? Not that I blame the lad or that Jaffa, the gods rest him, carried hard thoughts against Master Alfric! ‘Boys are liable to swordplay,’ he would say, ‘and it never hurt my hearing none.’ “

By Huma, she was good! I cast a glance over the book and at the bulldog trying desperately to look appealing. Alfric’s attention was no longer upon his knife. He was squirming, all right. I smirked into my pages.

“Well, Jaffa was restoring thatch to our roof—thatch where the mysterious fire touched it only a month gone by.”

It was Alfric’s turn to smirk, to look far too revealingly in my direction. I buried myself behind the cover of the book.

After all, I had never intended for that fire get out of hand.

The old bag continued, blissfully caught up in her unfolding tale of bloodshed.

“And this knight dismounts—oh, we had heard about him, about Sir Raven, as he goes by in the villages, about the demands for cheeses and livestock and the virtue of our daughters. And still we never thought he would come our way! But does a body ever think so until evil is at his doorstep?

“Anyway, the knight asks for cheese, and I want you to know that Jaffa, who was sliding down off of the roof when the gentleman asked, was fixing to give him that cheese and give it gladly, thinking he must be one of your family or friends or somehow connected to this house. But then Sir Raven asks for Ruby, our cow, and Jaffa figures who he is and stands still.”

“Still, but not defying him or mouthing at him in any way,” piped a younger voice out of the crowd gathered behind the old woman. Had they arranged this beforehand?

I was eager to ask about the mysterious knight, to know if he spoke in a voice that was low and soft and dangerous. But I couldn’t do that. Asking about him would reveal that I knew more than I was telling. I lifted my eyes from the book as the bulldog gave up and waddled over to where Alfric was sitting. It seemed that everyone was asking for trouble this morning.

“As the girl says: not defying him, mind you, but standing still until the knight grows itchy, asking for Ruby again, but this time not as much asking as telling, if you understand. Then he asks after Agnes, and only then does Jaffa answer him back with hard words.

“Agnes herself come to tell you that this is the fact,” the old bag said, and brought forth a pasty-faced, frog-eyed blonde about my age and twice my size, the very one who had been piping up behind her like some husky chorus. Jaffa’s wife or daughter? I neither knew nor cared. Whichever, the visitor would have done better to have snatched up Ruby the cow.

This Agnes took up the story where it had been left off, lumbering up to the forefront of the crowd, clutching a bloody shirt in her hands.

I confess, it was a bit too much for me.

“It’s just as the goodwife says, Your Knightship,” the girl whimpered, wringing the stained shirt in her heavy hands. “Jaffa just stands there. Then he drawed his knife and says to Sir Raven, he says, ‘High-born though ye may be, ye’ll not touch a hair of the girl.’ Those was his words entirely, or may the gods blight my family unto five generations.”

All of them seemed eager to put their families at stake. I could sympathize with that ploy. We heard the rest of the story from the old woman. How Jaffa stood fast, how words progressed to shouting, shouting to blows, and blows to a quickly drawn sword slipped clumsily into the peasant’s chest. After she had finished, there followed the usual weeping in front of the lord of the manor, six versions of the same story (all with the same unhappy ending), and the displaying of the helpless survivors—the old woman herself, the daughter (or wife—whatever). The peasants even offered to bring in Ruby (as the old woman put it, “the cow in question”) if it would soften Father’s heart the more.

Father’s face reddened as he listened to the outrages. Brithelm, too, was beside himself with sympathy. Alfric twitched and kicked the unfortunate bulldog, as Father promised retribution.

“Upon my honor as a Knight,” he claimed, hand on his sword, “I shall not rest until these wrongs have been righted, until the villain stands before me and receives punishment, until all those whose exploits touched upon these foul deeds are punished.”

And sure enough, as the peasants left in a flood of tears and worries and bless you, sirs, as they were leading the bereaved Agnes and the cow in question across the rickety moat bridge that the servants were too cowed to mend or even mind, Father turned upon my eldest brother.

“Set aside that dagger and look at me, boy.”

A quick glance told me that the boy at issue was Alfric, and I settled behind my book again, to listen and to enjoy.

“There is no answer to this in the duty of father to son, of son to father. Perhaps I have been too soft in dealing with you over the weeks, but the gods forgive me, I thought that nothing truly ill had come of this negligence. That indeed we were guilty of betraying the promises of host to guest, and though in the old days no punishment was severe enough for such betrayals, these are the new days, when the eye is inclined to blink at those misdeeds not . . . capital.”

He rose to his feet, and somehow in the morning light he seemed to take on a little of that stature and bearing he must have had before we were born, when he was counted among Coastlund’s finest before the declining years caught up with him and retired him to our little out-of-the-way estate.

He must have looked that way years ago, and by the gods, he must have been formidable! Had he asked questions then, I might well have spilled the story—told of my every misdeed with the Scorpion and even some things that happened years ago, simply because it looked as though he could see right through us and would punish us even more fiercely if we lied.

But Father was finished with questions. “That is no longer the case,” he continued. “You have done a terrible thing that becomes more terrible with time. Be it negligence or worse, for deeds such as this, the Measure alone provides the answer. The Measure and the Code.”

Father stared at the floor, stared ever so long before speaking again.

“I have no other choice. Would that it were otherwise, but my options have gone out.” He raised his sword in the formal Solamnic salute.

“Until Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, Knight of Solamnia, returns the thief, the false wearer of his armor, to our hands for trial and execution, I must confine my eldest son, Alfric Pathwarden, to the dungeon of these premises until we may determine a just and fitting punishment for his disgraceful actions in this matter. Within those forsaken walls, I hope my son will reflect upon his part in the crimes that have blotted the name of our family and of the Solamnic Order.”

I must admit I never thought Father had it in him. I looked at Brithelm, who shrugged and cast his gaze skyward. Alfric, on the other hand, was too astounded to do anything but laugh. And laugh he did at first, shaking his head in disbelief, kicking the bulldog once more, who, having finally caught on, lumbered over to Brithelm for safety and consolation.

Alfric stopped laughing as it finally sunk in that no matter how preposterous the punishment sounded, Father was not joking. Sobering, my brother tried to say something—anything—that would express his own indignity. All that issued forth was some sort of nasal bleating, as though somewhere out near the stables the servants were shearing a sheep.

Father stared unwaveringly at his first-born, his heir. “If you only knew,” he stated flatly, mournfully, “how grave a disappointment your actions have been to me, Alfric, that knowledge would be punishment enough.”

“Whaaaa,” my brother responded. The bulldog watched curiously from beneath Brithelm’s chair.

“But you have no more knowledge of honor, of responsibility, of penance, than . . . than . . .” Father’s eyes searched the room angrily, “than that bulldog crouched over there under Brithelm.” He pointed at the bulldog, who cringed.

“Whaaaa,” Alfric bellowed, and I couldn’t help it. I began to snicker. The angry stare turned suddenly, forcefully, in my direction.

I could guess how the men of Neraka had felt when my father was young, guarding passes.

“And seeing as my youngest son, your brother Galen, has not accorded himself in a manner to be entirely above suspicion, he shall join you in this period of confinement, until the facts are before us and we can see where all the blame might lie.”

“But, Father!” I began to plead. A panic-stricken sidelong glance at Alfric revealed a slow grin erasing his outrage and fear. We would be alone down in the dungeon, alone and out of earshot. And Alfric with yet another offense he could blame on me.

All I could do was stammer.

“But, Father! B-but, Father!”

Speechless for once. No better than Alfric.

The dungeon smelled of mold and oak and soured wine. I huddled in a corner in the dark. Then I moved toward the center of the far wall, still as far away from Alfric as possible without digging my way to freedom—which, of course, would be the first thing on the agenda if I survived the brotherly attentions that were sure to come.

Father stood in the doorway with Brithelm and Gilean-dos. Brithelm held a lamp that framed the party in flickering, dim light—Gileandos barely visible, for understandably, he shied away from flames, having last been ignited a month before in the last brotherly cooperation Alfric and I had enjoyed. You could barely see the glint of light on his bandages.

“You’ll be fed twice a day,” Father proclaimed. “We intend to be stern, but not inhumane. Each morning you will be allowed a walk through the courtyard, for fresh air.

“There is a lesson in this,” he continued. “A lesson for all of us. Though I shall be confounded if I can figure it.”

He moved back out of the light. I could see only Brithelm now, holding the lamp, gazing at me sorrowfully, sympathetically, no doubt wishing he could take my place.

From the dark at a distance, I could hear Father say, “I trust you are aware of how disappointed I am in the both of you.” Then the door closed, leaving us in total darkness.

And I heard Alfric growling, beginning to crawl my way across the dungeon floor.

Chapter Three

Although I always hated poetry, I remember wanting to be a bard. For I had seen their overnight performances in the moat house, and the whole business looked like a good deal. You were fed, then you told a story which nobody dared to call a lie, so you could embroider as much as you liked. Then you were paid for lying. It was a life to which I could become accustomed.

I lost that illusion early. Indeed, eight years ago, on a night I remember clearly, the illusion, you might say, flew over the moat and vanished.

When Quivalen Sath, the most famous of elvish bards, sang before my father in the moat house two weeks after my ninth birthday, it was enough to put me off poetry forever.

The night of the bard was the night that the blackmail began. Supervised by Gileandos, we boys cleaned the great hall of the moat house while Father prepared to receive the honored guest. Anxious that the hall look its best for the great artist, Gileandos was beside himself, even kicking a servant or two when he found the hearth still cluttered with ashes. I crouched, broom in hand, over the ashes, as the dusty boys ran from the room. I turned at the outcry of a stable groom, imported for the important job, who lay doubled up with pain beneath the table, awaiting another kick from Alfric, who stood above him smiling.

“A bit much, Alfric!” Gileandos exclaimed, as the old man swooned away beyond pain, clutching at the tablecloth as he lost consciousness.

“I got carried away,” Alfric growled. Then he crouched, dusted his boot, and grabbed the servant by the hair. Dragging the man from the hall, he laughed and called over his shoulder, “A lover of poetry, that’s me for sure!”

Even eight years ago Alfric would have set a table for a yokel with a cello if it meant a chance to kick the servants.

Quivalen Sath was no yokel, but in fact he looked like any other elf, no richer for his bardic experience, dressed in the green of a huntsman, his long hair slightly silvered. Still, he was solemn and eloquent, and, after all, he was a genuine celebrity, author of the same Song of Huma Gileandos had made me memorize last dreary winter in the same great hall, before my first retaliatory fire had singed his beard and half the face beneath it, cutting short our study of the classics.

Father and the elf exchanged pleasantries over dinner, and the inevitable pack of dogs crept into the room, drawn by the warmth of the fire and the smell of venison.

Alfric sneered at me from the far end of the table. I flashed him an obscene sign I had learned that morning from a stable boy. He bristled and stared at his wine cup, for this was the first banquet we had attended since he turned thirteen, and for the first time he had been allowed strong drink.

The elf stood to address all of us.

“I have chosen Mantis of the Rose for your evening’s entertainment,” murmured Quivalen Sath. There was probably some bardic grapevine to tell him Father’s favorite poem, for the old man smiled, raised his glass, completely unaware he was getting what Gileandos had dismissed as Quivalen Sath’s “earlier, second-rate efforts.”

After the meal, the entertainment began. Bored at once by some abstract theological tale of free will and roses in the sky, I watched Alfric, who had slumped in his chair as low as his armor would let him, wiping the blade of his dagger upon the back of a snoring dog, whose leg twitched blissfully in imagining he was being petted and scratched. And Brithelm, my middle brother, often mistaken for being absent at public occasions, stood rigid in his garb like some inane red scarecrow, having mastered the art of listening without paying attention. He was probably meditating.

On the other hand, Father was the good host, listening even to the most ridiculous parts of the story. Only Father, finally, offered the elf the respect his celebrity seemed to call for. It occurred to me afterwards, as the bard thanked my father for a dozen pieces of silver, tied his harp over his shoulder, and walked from the hall just as the red moon dipped into the west and the eastern sky began to redden, that if Quivalen Sath was so all-fired successful, why was he playing the backwater villages of Solamnia?

I was supposed to go straight to bed, but instead crept to the battlements, where I had left my toy soldiers when called to supervise the reception for the elf. The battlements were cold, even for an early morning in late summer. My legions were set in a convenient crenel overlooking the drawbridge and the low, swampy woods about a mile off to the west of the moat house. Some of the soldiers stood headless from extravagant use; others, quite intact, leaned against the battlements.

By this time Quivalen Sath had reached the other side of the moat, from where the well-tossed, iron-forged soldier must have stung considerably when it struck him on the back of his well-combed poetic head, and from where a nine-year-old would-be assassin could make himself virtually invisible, hidden among the clematis and ivy and the much more common weeds, undetected by even the sharpest of elvish eyes.

But by some stroke of ill luck, there were other eyes on the scene. Alfric had followed me to the battlements (remember I was only nine at the time, and not yet used to looking back over my shoulder constantly for suspicious brothers). Standing behind me, hidden by shadow and vines and crenelation, he witnessed the bombardment of Quivalen Sath.

The family heir seized me before the elf had rubbed his head, scanned the horizon, and returned to the path that led from our home toward the next way station in his endless poetic wanderings.

“I seen the whole thing, you little snit,” Alfric hissed.

“You mean you saw the whole thing,” I corrected, always delighted to remind my brother how I stood in greater favor with Gileandos than he ever had. It was not a wise thing to have said at the time, for Alfric was on me like a wild boar. My back to big brother, face pressed uncomfortably into the moss-covered stone of the battlement, head entangled with ivy and weeds like a wreath on the brow of a second-rate bard, I corrected my correction.

“Just what was it that you seen, Brother dear?”

“I seen you throw that soldier at the elf,” he replied.

“But what you never seen, Brother, was what that elf was up to. There was something glittering—I saw it—he held up to the light and then slipped into the sleeve of that long bardic robe. Probably our silverware, a crystal goblet from Father’s table.”

“But there wasn’t no crystal or silver at the table. We was entertaining poets, not merchants.” He pushed my face farther into the stonework. I tasted mortar, moss.

“But you didn’t see him mapping—mapping the terrain around the house. No doubt he’s a Nerakan agent or a spy for some anti-Solamnic fanatics who plan to lay siege to Father.”

Alfric’s grip did not slacken, nor did the pressure of granite against my nose diminish. I tried the last tactic.

“Has it occurred to you, Alfric, that you have been made the victim of elvish enchantment? Of hypnotism? That what you have seen only appeared to take place?”

No change in his grip or my posture, for Alfric was balancing upon that edge in which stupidity becomes a kind of insight: he simply did not have the imagination to believe anything beyond what his eyes told him. So I was forced to confess, to blubber and weep and beg, and to throw myself on his mercy, which, unfortunately, he had none of at the time.

But Alfric developed some imagination, to be sure, as the first faint glimmers of blackmail saw light in the months that followed. Hospitality was, as you already know, a big thing with Father, and my misdeed grew in my own imaginings, dangled constantly above my head by my brother’s cruelty and greed. It did not help matters that Quivalen Sath wrote one of his long-winded “epistles” to Father, in which he claimed to have been “granted a visionary moment” when a “godly missive” from the battlements of the moat house had struck him in the back of the head.

Was the object which plummeted from the heavens a gift from Branchala? As Sath never found the toy soldier (believe me, I took care of that by burying the entire army deep in the moat house midden), he took the evidence of a purple bump on his noggin as physical evidence that the artist must suffer to create. Unfortunately, the visionary moments expanded into blackouts over the next several months, from which the elf recovered eventually, writing of his experience in the poem Dark of Solinari, which, though never published, passed through our part of Coastlund by word of mouth. Its reference to “a gray Knight’s morning missive,” though ambiguous, was enough to keep Father guessing whether one of his sons was at the bottom of the mystery, especially when he caught the servants doubled over, reciting the line. No, Father would not forgive my insult to a famous bard. He would probably turn me loose to fend for myself in the swamp south of the moat house, Warden Swamp: from which, we knew, nobody returned. Under Alfric’s threats I took over his chores of cleaning the stables, of cleaning his private chambers. And when a horse or servant showed up lame, it was Galen the youngest, not the responsible Alfric, who confessed and suffered Father’s anger. Indeed, as the months passed into years, I began to wonder if owning up to the whole Sath business would do me some good. Probably not.

This is the way things were, a time in which I found a great delight in resentment, in plotting a revenge so sweet and elaborate that the pieces only began to fall into place eight years from that summer night, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, on a night I have told you of already.

From where I sat now, revenge had yet to become sweet. For no sooner had the light faded from the corridor, had the dungeon in which Alfric and I were confined resumed its silence, than my brother, as I have said before, began to crawl like a monstrous crab across the dark floor, stumbling and cursing in the dark, muttering, “Where are you now, you little felon?”

I leaped quickly behind the approaching voice, piped, “Over here!” and leaped again. I heard the crab-brother turn, curse, and again leaped behind the sound of that movement. It was hide-and-seek for keeps, and I knew it.

“Over here!” I squealed again, and there was movement at my feet. I leaped backwards, away from the sound, and into the strong arms of my brother.

Now it was Alfric’s turn. I felt a strong blow to the back of my head, clumsy but certain fingers encircling my throat, and I was falling somewhere, out of the dark into a greater darkness.

I awoke to a lantern shone into my eyes, to Gileandos’s face. He crouched above me, holding the lantern at arm’s length, clutching in his other hand a plate of bread and cheese. Two guards stood behind him, the amused keepers of our cell. I knew them from the stables, knew they delighted in Alfric’s imprisonment and were no doubt indifferent to whatever befell me.

“My lad, you have been ‘pummeled and cudgeled passing well,’ as the old poem says,” Gileandos exclaimed. It hurt me to sit up, to breathe, much less to remember any old poem. My left eye would barely open, and the light from the lantern hurt it terribly. Yes, pummeled and cudgeled passing well was a pretty good description. But Gileandos was not satisfied, and continued.

“Such maladies are not unusual among the recently incarcerated. The combination of melancholy, darkness, and damp air is a painful one, but rarely deadly. There are stories of Santos Silverblade, Solamnic Knight and ancestor to Sir Bayard Brightblade, our visitor. They tell how Santos survived the Siege of Daltigoth, though imprisoned in the dungeons of that hateful city, how when Vinas Solamnus and his followers entered Daltigoth as conquerors, opening the prisons, Santos emerged, as the song says, ‘battered and bruised but by no means beaten’. . .”

“Galen run into a wall,” my brother interrupted from the corner of our cell. “It was a rat what scared him, caused him to jump untimely.”

“Come, come, Alfric,” Gileandos scoffed, turning the lantern to my brother’s face, which appeared hungry but otherwise none the worse for wear. “It seems quite apparent that what we have is the aforementioned prisoner’s malady, aggravated no doubt by the unseasonable coolness of the weather, which I have established conclusively to stem from the precipitous action of sunspots upon marsh vapors, all of which factors . . .”

“He run into a wall. That’s the way it happened. Isn’t it, brother dear?” Alfric never took his eyes from me. I chose my words carefully.

“My brother is right, Gileandos. It was a wall, of that I am sure. And it was a rat that startled me, made me take the unfortunate leap that caused the wreckage you see here.”

I lay back, trying to look even more beaten, even more pathetic.

“And what is more, I could have escaped injury had I only listened to Alfric, who had told me to stand still until he could light a small fire for us to see by—a remarkable talent of his, for he can start a fire in the most unusual places . . . from the most unlikely materials.”

Clumsy, and maybe a little obvious.

“What’s that?” Gileandos leaned forward, his attention mine at last. “What’s that you say about fires?”

“Oh, never mind. As I was saying, I was startled,” I whimpered, “and perhaps to a small degree prey to that very malady you have mentioned, but rest assured it was a rat—a large one, the largest of the litter, but a common rat nonetheless—that led me to this sorry state you see before you.”

Gileandos leaned over me, squinted intently, set the plate beside me.

“There is more to a rat than the cheese he fancies,” he proclaimed, a question in his voice. “Your breakfast. Before it gets cold.”

He turned, closed the door behind him, and left us in darkness.

As his footsteps faded down the corridor, I heard movement in the far corner of the cell. I dodged, felt the wind of something large moving quickly past me, heard something hit the wall and my brother curse. I crept to the center—what I thought was the center—of the room.

“I got that part about the rat,” Alfric growled from somewhere.

Good. Then Gileandos might, too. I stayed silent.

“And what was that about fire, anyway?”

Still I was silent.

And so I remained for what could have been hours, even a day, moving when I heard movement, standing completely still when there was nothing to hear.

I was trying to come to terms with the possibility that I would never sleep again when a key jostled in the lock. Light bathed the cell, and I discovered Alfric and I were standing back to back, scarcely a yard apart. He turned, grabbed for me, and before my brother could make purchase or I could even begin to dodge, Father was between us, clutching a torch in his left hand, the front of Alfric’s shirt in his right, holding my rather abundant brother a good foot or so off the ground.

I marveled at the old man’s quickness and strength, swore to myself I would be as devoted a son as was convenient.

At the door stood our two burly guardsmen, who stared at us, obviously trying to hide their smirks. At a nod from the old man, they busied themselves with fixing leg irons to the dungeon wall. Upon another nod from my father, Gileandos stepped into the room.

I counted only two chains in the hands of the servants.

Father, still dangling my eldest brother, nodded once more to Gileandos, who explained the new circumstances in his best lecturer’s voice.

“Never lie to your elders, Galen. You haven’t the subtlety nor the experience. For speech, my lad, is a text wherein the trained mind can discover wonders, and there was indeed no way that one of your age and . . . lack of sophistication . . . could have known that in lying, paradoxically, he was revealing the truth.”

It didn’t sound good for me. The old man continued in senile revery. I longed for coals, for phosfire, for Father’s torch. He was asking for yet another enkindlement.

“For every text, verbal or spoken,” he droned on, “has a subtext, and the subtext of your lie revealed quite clearly that Alfric was the rat of your little story, that your injury involved no rat in what we might call the literal sense, no wall beyond the simple—albeit violent—constraint of the aforementioned brother. Am I correct?”

“Yes, Gileandos.” Why confuse him with the full truth? I tried to appear awed, shaking my head, smiling stupidly. He smiled back condescendingly.

“And what is more, you unraveled a mystery the heart of which I have sought to penetrate these six months passing, since the initial, unfortunate conflagration? Am I correct?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come, come, lad. Did you think I was content to burst unexplainably into flame every now and then without getting to the heart of the matter? In seeking to cloak your brother’s bullying, you have indeed uncovered what we might call his . . . more dangerous tendencies. Now wouldn’t the truth have been more wise from the start?”

“I suppose so, Gileandos.”

As the servants placed a fuming, sputtering Alfric in the leg irons, Father glared at him, waving the torch like a mythical sword.

I knew better than to speak now. Gileandos continued.

“Your father and I have counseled over your punishment, Galen, and we have determined it would be most fitting for you to see your brother made an example for his misdeeds. You will continue your stay here in the dungeon until Sir Bayard recovers the armor. We trust you will be edified by the fate of your brother who, having grown to manhood, will be disciplined, no doubt, as befits a man.”

My father expressed puzzlement at how he could have fathered an arsonist, a mystic, and a liar, with no promising Knight in the whole bunch. The two servants were probably wondering if all wealthy families were like this.

They left the dungeon in silence. Then, across the cell in the darkness, I heard the chains rattle like in a bad horror story. My brother begin to elaborate on what he would do if he could get his hands on me. I sat, rested my back against the door. I took stock.

“As I see it, Alfric, these threats and dire promises aren’t worth much while you’re in the leg irons. And the way things look, you’ll be in leg irons forever. The odds are you’ll be stuck here for at least another decade until another Knight decides to comb up some renown for fairness by giving you a last try as a squire.

“How many times has it been, anyway, Alfric? ‘Too great a reptile to be a squire.’ Wasn’t that what Sir Gareth de Palantha said when you were fourteen? When he found you had rifled an alms box to buy those enchanted spectacles from the merchant, those spectacles that were supposed to let you see through Elspeth’s clothing? Even I could have been a squire at fourteen, could become one tomorrow if I set my mind to it. That is, in any other family.

“But Father has to farm you out first, because you are the eldest. Can you imagine how embarrassing it is to him, when other Knights of the Order have sons in the lists of Knighthood, have grandsons as squires, and he must care for a twenty-one-year-old slug who lolls around the house eating his venison, drinking his wine, dreaming only of thrashing servants and riding horses to death?”

A cry arose out of the darkness. With relish I continued.

“And now it’ll be another ten years for sure. By that time it’ll be the last try, because even an idealist is going to be embarrassed by a thirty-year-old hulk lugging his armor around. The priesthood’ll be all that’s left for you by then, and perhaps you’ll be even a little too old for that, as we both know Brithelm will be well on the way towards spiritual purity and you’ll be some grizzled novitiate whose sum of life experience amounts . . .”

It was pat, like the old comedies when you mention someone’s name and he walks in immediately. The key rattled in the door, and led by candlelight and a gust of warmer air from the sunlit rooms above, my brother Brithelm, the one true innocent in the family, entered the room of conspiracy behind the impatient guards. It was getting busy down here, to be sure. And it was irritating, especially when I was in the midst of enraging Alfric, who was wrenching himself against the chains.

But after all, it was Brithelm. And being the one true innocent, he felt sorry for us.

“How are you, brothers? This damp, smothering cell—the rats, the darkness, the smell of decay. I hate it that we’ve kept you here this long. But I think it’s nearly over.”

“What’s nearly over, Brithelm?” asked my oldest brother, his voice rising in pitch and volume as, after my speech, he no doubt imagined himself in boiling oil, at best a thick and dangling noose.

“You’re to come with me at once,” Brithelm continued, crouching beside me, holding the candle in front of him, the better to see the family heir dangling from the wall, “to an audience with Father in the great hall. Bayard returned not quite an hour ago, and he has the thief of his armor in tow.”

The Scorpion! This was what Brithelm called good news.

“I expect the truth will out,” he continued, “and the name of Pathwarden will be cleared by both of you.”

Yes. Unto the fifth generation.

Torches smoldered in the sconces, lit hurriedly against the gathering dusk and the gathering crowds. For the great hall was alive and astir, and dog-infested: mastiffs, beagles, and bloodhounds clambered on the table, fought by the hearth, romanced behind tapestries. In his haste to render swift and merciless justice, Father had not bothered to clear the room.

The dog act preceded the main show, which involved us.

Father and Bayard sat in places of honor, ornate and official, dressed to question the prisoner in black. The servants had gathered, eager for gossip, and even the peasants had returned at the prospect of blood. But it was the prisoner that concerned me at the moment. Thin, almost skeletal, his pipe stems scarcely resembling the strong, wiry legs of the visitor I recalled. He was decked in black all right, but sixty years old if he was a day. I awaited the voice to confirm my hopes.

I was sure that Bayard had brought in the wrong party.

Which was fine by me. Far better a scapegoat than the real item—the Scorpion who could implicate me in a web of wrongdoings that might entangle the family unto the fifth generation. I walked to the middle of the hall with the guardsmen and Alfric. Brithelm took his place at the arm of Father’s chair. Bayard was watching us closely, leg dangling over the arm of his chair, fingers steepled, gray eyes fastened to our faces and gestures. I expect the same idea had occurred to him: that the man in black was hardly the rugged type, no match for Alfric, let alone the rustic likes of Jaffa. This poor soul had probably dropped his weapon at first sight of Bayard. I was half-tempted to identify the rascal in front of us as the Scorpion if it would shake us loose of the cellars. But I kept my tongue, knowing that such an identification would raise ugly questions as to how close a view I had gotten of the assailant in the first place. The rascal in front of us had no such restraints. “That’s him. That’s the one who helped me,” he said, in a voice as harsh and dry as old paper. He groveled in front of Father and with a bony finger pointed directly at me.

“You must mean Alfric,” I claimed in desperation. “I have never seen you up until this moment.”

Bayard rose from his chair, watching me even more intently. He cleared his throat, spoke calmly to the prisoner, his eyes, like Father’s, fixed on me.

“Do you know at whom you are leveling charges, man? For theft is a grave charge . . .” Bayard paused, looked toward the fire, and then leveled his gray, stark eyes upon me again. “Theft is a capital charge, not a simple failing such as . . . such as dozing on the watch. Someone’s life could hang in the balance, lad.”

I had begun to dislike Sir Bayard Brightblade, who was making me uncomfortable. So I spoke up.

“Well, sir, never did I obtain clear view of the culprit, as I have said, and never would I conspire against your property or person. You can believe me, or you can believe this wayward sort you have captured red-handed with the evidence.” I gestured dramatically toward the prisoner.

All eyes fixed on the man in black who quivered in handcuffs at the my father’s feet. All eyes except those of my father, who was deferring in these circumstances to Bayard, whose eyes were focused on me, gray and ever intent.

“If that is my choice, I’ll believe you, young master,” Bayard replied, rising from his chair and turning his back to me. He stepped lightly over a retreating dog and walked toward the mantle of the fireplace, stopping to stand over his recovered armor, which lay in a glittering heap on the hearth.

“But that is the one who helped me, and I can prove it,” the prisoner insisted. Hardly an orator, but his words drew fire and attention. Now Father sprang to his feet, hearing what he had wanted to hear all along, I suppose—that his precious eldest son, poor Alfric, was really guilty of no more than being petty, dimwitted, and in the wrong place. Bayard did not move, but turned away, staring into the fire a long and suspenseful time before proclaiming:

“Once again, let us hear your version of what happened that night, Alfric.”

Clumsily my brother began, his eyes darting back and forth—looking for approval first to Father, then to Bayard. I had seen the look before. He was trying to figure out if he needed to lie to stay out of trouble. It was beyond him, so he barreled on into a cloudy version of the same old truth.

“That night I come up from the banquet, all set to police the upstairs quarters, for as you have always told us, Father, the times is hard ones, and but a few honest men about.”

“May it not be one less than you’re claiming, boy,” Father threatened, reddening under his red beard and eyebrows. Bayard sighed, returning to his chair as a cloud passed over the sun outside and the windows grew dark, the blue in the wings of the stained glass kingfishers fading to a flat gray until it looked as though someone was standing at the east window. For a moment, preposterous though it seemed. I thought that someone was standing at the window—a spy on the proceedings, perhaps. I looked at Bayard to see if he had noticed. He was seated, listening to the words of my brother.

“I seen Galen at the door of Sir Bayard’s chambers, and being as I intend to be a squire all protectful of my master’s interests . . .”

“Yes, yes, Alfric,” Bayard pressed. “You opened the door for your brother . . .”

“Who said there was a suspicious sort lurking on the grounds outside. Things become kind of hazy from that point on, sir. I don’t reckon I saw what hit me. Could of been that felon there.

“Far as I know, could of been Galen.”

He smiled blamelessly, his treacherous heart fulfilled at last.

There was muttering among the servants and peasants—this, in fact, was great entertainment for the likes of them. Father reddened to the brink of apoplexy and sat back in his chair, gripping its arms until I could hear them creaking and expected the wood to splinter. Brithelm leaned over Father’s right shoulder, his sorrowful face so pale and compassionate that I began to wonder if he, too, was hiding mischief. Bayard sat back, squinted at me, and looked pained.

“Next thing I knowed,” Alfric continued serenely, “I was being dragged out of the closet by yourself, regaining my wits at the tail end of that little weasel’s alibis.”

I began to blubber and whine.

“Father, this is absolutely unfair.”

That was good. I choked, looked to the floor, then walked quickly toward one of the corners where a gutted torch smoked in a sconce.

“. . . and you, Sir Bayard, whose trust I fear my brother’s unkind words have taken and twisted and broken like so many snap beans . . .”

A bad comparison, but homespun, and sure to get the sympathy of the servants and the peasants, which I could use at the moment. I stared wide-eyed at the sputtering torch, allowing the smoke to pass over my face, make my eyes burn and water.

Nearest thing to weeping one can get. I turned back to my audience, tears streaming. The prisoner smiled faintly, reached into the folds of his cloak. Bayard noticed the movement and stepped quietly away from the fireplace, on his guard, staring intently at the disheveled man in black.

“Oh, you fine gentleman, my negligence has left me a disgrace to my Father and his glorious past . . .”

I bowed my head. Brithelm stepped forward and took my arm gently.

“. . . a disgrace to the family Pathwarden five generations back. Five generations hence.”

“Galen. Galen.” My brother Brithelm rose to his consoling best. “Surely nothing you have done . . .” I tore my arm from his comforting grasp, buried my face in my hands, and continued.

“Would that it were so! But my negligence is shameful. I shirked and nodded as well as my older brother...”

“Did more than nod, Galen Pathwarden,” the prisoner brayed triumphantly. “More than nod, for you embraced the business with greed.”

To my astonishment, from his cloak the bony prisoner drew my naming ring, the token that he—or someone who had stolen the armor that fateful night—had taken from me, taken to assure my silence. A torch in the far corner of the hall went out, but the servants were too enthralled by the drama to move and the light went untended. I stammered, fumbled for a story.

And came up empty. All I could manage were stammers and squeals, a feeble, “How did he get my naming ring? It can’t be mine! It must be a forgery! Oh, to compound burglary with counterfeit goods . . .”

Father was on his feet, the huge chair rocking as he leaped from it. Dogs scattered, whimpering.

“Silence, Galen!” the old man thundered. “How did he know your name? How could he copy your naming ring, when only one exists in the world for the copying?”

“I don’t know, sir. Perhaps he . . . wrested it from my unconscious hand the night he stole the armor?”

Father wasn’t buying.

“Show me your hand!” Father commanded in a tone that brooked no quibbling.

I had no choice but to comply. My bare, quivering hand caused a ripple of murmurs and I told you sos among the attentive servants. Father’s face turned a dark shade.

“But . . . but—”

“And why,” asked Father in an ominously hushed voice, “have we not heard about the disappearance of your naming ring until this very moment?”

I was hard put to come up with a quick lie for that one. The silence was deadly.

“Galen, I am sorely wounded,” Father said after an interminable lull, his voice low and dispirited. “When I consider this armor thief, when I consider you and your brother and what all of you have done, collectively and separately, I’m sore tempted to execute the thief and thrash the both of you until you long for execution. But I suppose that’s against Solamnic code, no matter how it conforms with good sense. I’ll leave all judgments, all sentencing to Sir Bayard Brightblade.”

With that I was escorted from the room, as roughly as my brother but fortunately not back to the same cell. Alfric was allowed the run of the house, still under punishment for his oversight but I was temporarily confined to Gileandos’s library. We saved the real cell, for we only had one, for the man in black. There among lecterns and desks, books and scrolls, bones and specimens and alchemical alembics and tubings, I cast the Calantina once more, receiving the nine and eleven, tunnel on stone, the Sign of the Rat. I consulted the books, the commentary, and again was baffled by my fate.

I waited for hours, the only sounds the tolling of the bell in the tower tolling three, four, then five. Some time in the late afternoon the faint shrill of a jay outside the library window, and twice the unmistakable sniffing and heavy breathing of my brother poking about outside in the corridor.

Once he tested the door. To his disappointment and my relief, it was locked, and after the events of a fortnight past, he was no longer keeper of the keys. Nonetheless, I hid the bag of opals deep in the pocket of my tunic, then passed time until evening.

I read a book on dwarf lore and another on explosives. I tried on several of Gileandos’s robes, hung fastidiously in the alcove of the library, and played awhile with the elixirs and powders he kept by the alchemical machinery. Finally, I climbed upon a table and slept amid papers and manuscripts, until I awoke to a darkness outside and the disturbing feeling you have when you wake in a room and know you are not alone.

“Wh—who’s there?”

No answer, but eventually the sound resolved itself into a brief, erratic fluttering noise over by the window. Evidently something else was trapped in here besides a youngest son.

I lit a candle, held my breath, moved toward the sound.

It was only a bird perched on the sill—a huge, ungainly raven who battered the dark panes of the window with its darker wings. I reached over the bird and opened the window, whispering, “How did you get in here, little bird?”

The creature stood on the sill, regarding me listlessly. For a moment it seemed like a stuffed bird sitting there, and I wondered had I dreamed the movement, the noise.

Then it cocked its head slowly, almost mechanically, and spoke in a dry voice out of nowhere.

“In much the same fashion as you, little boy. I meddled with those more powerful than I.”

“What?” The candle slipped from my hand. I snatched at it by reflex, fumbling it and burning my hand on the hot tallow as the wick went out.

We were in darkness again, but a darkness broken by moonlight through the now-open window. The raven backed along the sill, bathed in the red light of Lunitari. He cocked his head again and leaped sluggishly into the air, landing atop the lectern with scarcely a flap of his wings.

“Did you think I would abandon those who . . . obeyed me? That I would throw you to the Solamnic wolves?”

The voice was flat and without music in the throat of the raven, but instantly I recognized its rhythm, its soothing phrases covering iron and poison. The air in the library grew colder.

“I. . . trusted you would come back, sir,” I lied, shivering.

“You’re lying.” The bird hopped once nervously. “But nonetheless I am back.

“I have further need of you,” the voice of the Scorpion said.

“It is an absolute delight to be of service to you, sir, and let me add that . . .”

“Silence!” The voice seemed too large for the bird, too large for the room itself. I backed into a chair, which tumbled over into an array of tubing and retorts and glassware containing the gods .knew what elixirs.

“You still have much to do for me, Galen Pathwarden. Much to do to save that skin of yours.”

All of this struck me as slightly less ominous coming from a bird.

“What now? Haven’t I tangled myself in enough webbing for your satisfaction?” I scrambled to my feet, knocking over still another beaker in the process.

“Hardly.” The raven regarded me with a brief, dull-eyed stare. “You see, I make friends for life, and, after all, you didn’t expect a half dozen opals for what little you’ve done, did you?

I wrapped one of Gileandos’s robes about me; it was genuinely cold in here by now.

“Do you think I am trapped in this shape? That I could not become an adder, a leopard, your coiled friend with the sting in his tail from a few nights back—you remember the night?”

I nodded stupidly, forgetting it was dark.

“A few nights back, you ran up your debt, little boy. And you have only begun to pay it.”

“Would you like the opals back? We could call it even.”

“But ‘even’ it is not, Galen. For I lose my valuable servant in the bargain—the man confined to your cellar dungeon, who can no longer serve me because I chose to play by the rules.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“So I must be returned a servant, little Galen, to make up for the one I have lost. I suppose it is needless to add that you are that servant.”

I was thunderstruck, gaping for words.

“So it is you who will do what I say. You will accompany this Sir Bayard on his trip into southern Solamnia, on the road to the tournament he desires so fiercely to win. You will attend to his weaponry, his wardrobe, his livery—all things a squire attends to.

“And during your journey with Sir Bayard, you will provide me with intelligence on occasion—little things as to his whereabouts, his state of mind, what he intends to do next.

“Above all, you will take your time getting to the tournament. You will see to it that Bayard Brightblade takes his.”

What strange new twisting and turning was this? Why was I so unlucky to be the chosen one?

“You’ll have to okay this with my father, sir,” I replied in relief. “For I’m to be confined here for a while—awaiting punishment. Remember, you saw to it that Father saw my naming ring in the hands of the man in black, and connected me with this whole unsavory business. No, I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see how I can be of any help. You’ll have to look elsewhere for a qualified cohort, although it grieves me to disappoint you in this fashion.”

“Ah, but I cannot be disappointed, little man. Oh, no, for I carry your freedom in the crook of my claw.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The naming ring. Since we are in the business of returning things desired to one another.” The bird took wing, sailing straight at me. I flinched, covered my face, then felt the soft prickling of claws on my shoulder. I lowered my hand and stared directly into its dull eyes.

“Look to my feet, idiot,” the raven croaked.

“My naming ring! You have it around your ankle! How’d you—”

“Never left my possession,” the bird declared smugly.

“You were sent up the river by spurious goods.”

“And I suppose I just tell Father that and he releases me on the spot?” I walked to the window, raven perched on my shoulder.

“Of course not. But when he sees this ring and compares it with the one already in his possession, he will realize how close he came to losing a son to forgery.”

The bird tucked its head under its wing as the light of the red moon passed over us once more.

“Which is why,” it continued, lifting its head once more, “that it is Bayard who will show him the ring. Bayard will find the ring in his quarters this very night, and in addition to seeking your release will also seek to make amends.”

“How will he make amends?”

The raven spread its wings and crouched. “Oh, you will see. And when he does, you will know what to do.”

With that it lifted off into the night air, gliding over the courtyard until it turned sharply and was lost from sight somewhere in the back of the moat house. * * * * *

I slept fitfully once more, my dreams filled with scorpions and the terrible sounds of beating wings. And I awoke to the same unsettling feeling—that once again I was not alone.

I looked about cautiously and saw a candle bobbing at the library entrance, behind it a tall figure. I reached to my belt in a desperate search for my knife, which I now recalled had been taken from me at the outset of my stay in the dungeon.

“Who is it?” This time a little more steadiness in my voice. I tried for menace and failed. The candle raised, and the one lamp in the library began to glow.

Sir Bayard Brightblade stood beneath it, outlined in the red and yellow and gold of the lamp flame, that now-familiar look of puzzlement and amusement on his face.

“This room is rather sparsely lit for a library,” he observed, turning to face me across a wide vellum-littered table.

“Gileandos’s doing . . .” I started to explain, but the Knight was off and running.

“My business with you is brief or long, Galen, depending on your choice.”

Sir Bayard paused, looked down at the table in front of him, thumbed the page of a manuscript, and read for a moment. His shadow was long, magnified by the slanting light, stretching the length of the table and losing itself in the dark.

“It seems that you are reprieved,” he said softly, and opened his hand.

My naming ring glittered in his palm. I could recognize the engraving from where I stood. It was sensible to be silent now, to hear what he had to say.

“I found it on the mantle in my chambers not an hour ago. Placed there perhaps by someone who knew the thief’s ring to be a forgery and had pity on you, was my first guess. A servant, perhaps?

“Whoever it was did you a good turn. This ring is almost identical to the one in the thief’s possession—I compared them in your father’s chambers—almost identical except that the one in the thief’s possession is now demonstrated to be a fake.”

“Then someone returned the original to show . . . that I hadn’t given it to the thief! I was innocent all along!”

“It appears thusly,” Sir Bayard brooded. “Although it leaves the questions of how your ring was copied by the thief, or where it has been concealed all this time, unanswered. Troubling questions, I should say.”

My heart sank. “Magical means? Or Alfric, perhaps?” I prompted innocently.

“Perhaps. Perhaps,” Bayard replied distractedly, his face impassive. He coughed impressively. “Be that as it may, you are in the clear and I am no closer to filling the position of squire and keeping my appointment in the southlands. Which is why . . .” He paused here and cleared his throat again, nervously, it seemed to me. “I am offering that position to you.”

“But Alfric . . .”

“Had a responsibility, and didn’t do all that well with it. Alfric is still under a cloud here and Sir Andrew will not hear of it. I’ve thought long and hard in the last hour, Galen. You could have lied your way out of the thief’s accusations—made up some story about being intimidated into giving him the ring, or having it taken from you in a struggle. But you did not. You kept the silence, willing to suffer false accusation rather than lie to save yourself.”

I liked his version of the facts.

“That’s the kind of squire a Knight looks for.”

“B-but . . .”

“And if I’m wrong, Galen, time and the road will show it. I’m in need of a squire now, and of all those available you seem most suitable.”

Chapter Four

Being a squire was no glamorous thing, I discovered. There are only so many times a boy can see his face reflected in a polished breastplate and pride himself in how well that breastplate has been polished. My particular limit was once.

I quickly grew to despise this Sir Bayard Brightblade more than any brother or teacher or servant, especially when he set me to buffing his armor.

They had moved me out of the library and into Brithelm’s quarters, chosen because the room had no windows by which I could escape, no standing furniture from which I could fashion weapons. It was barren and bleak in there. The only comfort was a rug and a straw mattress on the floor, the only conveniences a walk-in closet, a fireplace, and a single lamp. I had little to distract me, and armor aplenty to buff and polish. On a dark, chilly morning, several days hence, we made final preparations to set off on whatever harebrained quest Bayard had planned. The weather inclined toward rain—promising the kind of morning I would usually avoid altogether, sleeping in until afternoon. But I was readying to embark in the rain and the early cold, with only four hours of sleep, bound for the gods knew where.

“What’s the difference?” I began, talking to myself, perhaps a little loudly. “I would like to know what’s the difference, thank you, since my new employer is downstairs with Father and Brithelm, sitting at a farewell breakfast in the great hall while I am upstairs with the polish and the rags?

“For the life of me,” I whined, setting my cloth to the intricate visor of the helmet, “I can’t see much difference between this and cleaning Alfric’s chambers. Who is this Bayard Brightblade, after all, but another taskmaster? Only this one is set to cart me off to southern Solamnia where he bashes the heads of other Knights and wins the heart of the damsel while I get to polish armor and tend to the horses and run little errands. I’m already tired of being some damn southern hotshot’s factotum!”

I liked that last phrase, closed my eyes, repeated it.

I then surveyed my squirely work and realized that I had no idea how to put the armor back together. Greaves lay by the fireplace, the breastplate on the mattress where I had set it aside out of boredom, the gloves on the plain rug in front of the fire, and the helmet half-polished in my hands. Cords of leather lay strewn everywhere. There was elaborate lacing to this machinery, but I wasn’t a party to its workings.

“The pieces never fit together,” I whimpered. “None of the pieces fit, in Bayard’s armor or in Bayard himself. What am I supposed to tell the Scorpion when I don’t know what I’m spying for, can’t figure out the man I’m spying on?”

I walked to the fireplace and held my hands to the warmth of the little blaze.

“First of all, he doesn’t believe me when I identify his prisoner as the Scorpion. Of course, he wasn’t the Scorpion, but Sir Bayard couldn’t know that. Anyway, he doesn’t say anything, but I figure he can’t believe me because of the questions he asks. Now where was that wax?”

I reached into my pockets, took out the high-pitched dog whistle I had used to disrupt the great hall time and again, turning Father’s formal reception room into a churning frenzy of hounds, terriers, and mastiffs. I tossed it onto Brithelm’s mattress by the breastplate.

Then my even more prized possessions. First, the red Calantina dice, twelve-sided wooden curiosities from Estwilde. There were one hundred and forty-four numbers you could roll with them, and tradition had assigned to each number a symbolic animal and three lines of verses that were supposed to be prophetic, but usually turned out to be too obscure to be helpful. Only later, when you looked back on the reading, could you usually say, “Oh, that’s what the reading meant.”

It wasn’t ever much help, but it made you think there were ways to see things coming, and the thought was strangely reassuring.

After the dice, my gloves. I had purchased them from a merchant who swore they had adorned the hands of a Solamnic captain at the Battle of Chaktamir. I paid for them with the servants’ money when they had heard that Sir Bayard was coming. He had quite a reputation for heroism, and before his arrival the younger servants had begged me in the scullery, in the broom closet, in the downstairs corridors, offering me their pennies for just one peek at the fabled armor.

Those pennies were gone now, spent on the pair of thick leather gloves I tossed on the bed by the dice. I had not dreamed of wearing them around the moat house, since their stitching was intricate and costly, down to the phases of the red moon dyed and stamped upon the knuckles. Sporting such attire in front of Father would raise uncomfortable questions.

But the servant children raised no such questions, being the innocent and trusting souls they were. The night before the theft I had gotten around to telling them that viewing the armor would be impossible and that it had cost me all of their pennies even to ask for such a viewing. They bought my explanation, too, thinking perhaps that such was the way one transacted business with a Solamnic Knight.

With the whistle, the dice, and the gloves on the bed, I continued to ferret through my pockets.

“There must be wax in here somewhere . . .”

I gave up on the one pocket and moved to the other, all the while pondering my change in circumstances. Pondering Bayard Brightblade, who was a mystery.

“First he strips Alfric of squirehood for nodding off and losing the armor, then he takes me on for the same job when he seems to suspect I did far worse. And it isn’t soft-heartedness on his part, some bygones-be-bygones kind of gibberish. He slapped the poor man in black in the heart of the dungeon and is talking execution. Beheading! I didn’t know the Knights of Solamnia let you do that kind of thing, much less that Bayard would take it on himself to do it! The joke on him is that the poor fellow is hardly the Scorpion, for the Scorpion, as I and only I well know, is cavorting in the body of a raven presently. Ha! Ha!” I glanced over my shoulder nervously, just in case someone was eavesdropping. No one.

Exploring the new pocket, my fingers brushed against something leather. I drew out the little purse and looked in it for wax, but it was empty except for the six opals that came in it that fateful night of the Scorpion’s first visit. I remembered the scorpion standing in my hand and shuddered.

They looked like eggs, those stones, and I wished the raven had settled for them. I started to hide them in Brithelm’s room, thought better of it, and set them lightly on the bed by my other possessions. The wax was growing more necessary. For it seemed like a good plan: to melt bits of it over the pieces of armor, using it as a sort of makeshift glue or mortar. It wouldn’t hold them together long, but it might work long enough so that I could ask an unwitting kitchen servant to move the suit to Bayard’s quarters, blaming the poor boy loudly when the suit fell apart.

Such was my strategy, but you probably know what they say about the plans of mice and men. That goes for weasels, too, evidently.

When I heard the rattle of a key in the lock, I thought of Alfric, who was even less fond of me now that I had become Bayard’s squire in his stead. He was still condemned to fester in the moat house, while Father pondered his inadequacies, and though his hand was usually stayed by the presence of others, I did not doubt that he plotted outrage.

So it was deep into the closet for me, closing the door behind me and slipping under the hanging robes as though they were a curtain. I checked to see if they were a curtain indeed, testing the back wall for secret doors, for passageways, but with no results. I was backed into here, brought to ground. Outside I heard the movement of metal on stone, the muffled ring of metal on metal. Someone was doing something to the armor.

Sometimes curiosity outweighs prudence, and this was one of those times. I parted the curtain of robes and opened the closet door ever so slightly, admitting the light from the fireplace and from the one lamp in the room. Needless to say, I thought first of illusion when I looked through the crack of the closet door and saw Bayard’s breastplate floating above the bed, nothing supporting it but the dark air below it. Done by mirrors, no doubt. I mean, isn’t that the first thing you think when the magical intrudes in your otherwise unmagical life? I did what almost all of us would do: I looked for trapdoors and fictions.

Which there were none of in view at the moment. Only Brithelm, standing motionless in the center of the room. He watched calmly, even playfully, as the armor glowed red, then yellow, then white. Slowly it collected itself. The greaves got up and walked from the fireplace to the pallet, as though strapped to the body of an ancient phantom. There, as an unearthly music began to tumble out of the walls of the room, the greaves joined the assembling suit.

And all of this having something to do with my middle brother, standing serenely, left hand in the air, singing along with the music from the walls. The armor, now entirely assembled, stood shakily in the air, as though suspended in water. The music faded, and Brithelm laughed softly and sat down upon his mattress. I fell back into the closet, marveling. Sat there for a few minutes, marveling further. There was a soft rattle of metal in the room outside my door, then the sound of movement, of Brithelm walking across the room, then nothing but silence. Outside the window the song of a nightingale started up, much as it had on the night the intruder crept into Alfric’s quarters and started all this mess. The last song before departure. Beyond the sound of bird song rose the whicker of a horse. Bayard had sent the grooms to the stables and was readying things for our journey.

But I nearly forgot departure in the face of this revelation—this trick my middle brother could do with armor, which was probably not the only trick in his bag. Apparently, I had been duping the wrong sibling for years. If Brithelm could rearrange armor like that, imagine what he could have done with dice!

Which reminded me. The gloves, the Calantina dice, the dog whistle, and the purse lay out in the open, well within the view of even the most distracted of brothers.

I stepped into the room. The armor had settled, reassembled, in the corner by the door to the hallway, as though it had been donned by a ghost who, now tired of wearing it, had laid it carefully out of the way. Brithelm was carefully out of the way himself, lost in thought or meditation or revery, seated on the thin and obviously uncomfortable pallet in the center of the room. I called to him softly, called again, and then a third time, but there was no answer. He sat cross-legged, palms upward, eyes closed blissfully, like an icon in an old temple, the kind that you still chanced across if you traveled far enough into the swamps or high enough into the mountains, abandoned hundreds of years back.

It gave me the willies, that was for sure. And it was worse when Brithelm began to rise from the pallet himself, not standing, mind you, but hovering in the air like a hummingbird, while he still sat blissfully, sat with his eyes closed and his palms raised. Once more I tried to rouse him, but it was no use. Judging from the sound outside the window, Father was helping Bayard prepare the horses in the courtyard, giving him final advice as to how to care for me.

“I suppose, Sir Bayard,” his voice boomed, “that the time will come when you have to teach him a better horsemanship than he’s accustomed to, the teaching of which may involve beating some sense into the lad.”

“That it might, Sir Andrew. Tighten that cinch there, if you’d be so kind.”

“And he isn’t a lancer. I spent my time with Alfric in the lists, and he’s the best jouster of the three, but our best is none too good. The time will come when Wea—uh, Galen will have to sit the charger, the teaching of which may involve beating some sense into the lad.”

“Indeed, Sir Andrew. Is Valorous’s bit too tight?”

“I think not, Sir Bayard. And in swordsmanship . . .”

“I suppose I’ll beat him there, too. Are the stirrups high enough?”

And so on. Father could think of many things I lacked the sense to do, so he could be trusted to keep talking for an hour or so, after which Bayard’s politeness would be stretched to the absolute limit and he would ask where his squire and his armor had gotten to.

I glanced over at Brother Brithelm, who floated above his thin mattress of reeds. I reached under him, collected my belongings. Then I went to the door and started to hoist the armor, but turned suddenly. I set the whistle in Brithelm’s palm as a keepsake, as a mystery he might well ponder when he awakened to reality. This was no more than mischief, for I knew that addle-brained Brithelm would no doubt spend hours trying to decipher the meaning of the dog whistle that had materialized in his palm. I thought at first of giving him the opals, but considering the road and those upon it, I fancied I could use them more. How could I know that the dog whistle, in different hands and in different ways, would continue its history of disruption?

The horses resented their loss of sleep, too. The courtyard filled with their coughs, their snorts, their other, less polite sounds. About their legs scurried dogs, who barked hysterically at the cold and the surprisingly early movement of people and livestock. Steam rose from the horses’ bodies, steam also from Bayard’s breath and Father’s breath, clouded by the mysterious winter which had come early to our part of the country. With Bayard’s help I managed to sling the armor over the back of a pack mare, who stared at me over her shoulder with pure and absolute hatred. I covered the armor with a light canvas blanket, strapped on my own sword—a pitiful little weapon it seemed now—and Bayard helping me once again, I managed to rise to the back of another horse. To my embarrassment I was riding old Molasses, a horse we kept about so that visiting small children might be entertained with brief rides around the courtyard.

Father still had no respect for my horsemanship.

My last minutes at the moat house were occupied in receiving advice.

“You are to be a good squire to Bayard, boy. That means you don’t lie or steal, which I know is asking for profound change in your conduct, yet nonetheless, I ask—no, demand it.

“Do not let the armor get dirty. Keep the weapons in good condition—they may save your hide in some unforeseen circumstance.”

Some unforeseen circumstance. I liked that. The old man was waxing chivalric. But the whole ritual of advice and farewell was tiresome. I peeked into my saddlebags.

“Pay attention when I am addressing you! Carry the messages word for word. Curry the horses when Bayard tells you, and nose at their shoes for stones and bruises. Moss grows on the north side of trees—that in case you find yourself lost. When you encounter evil, face it bravely—as the Order says, ‘Without regard to personal suffering.’

“As life is a precious and most holy gift from Paladine, in whom we breathe, fight, and dream for the betterment of all, see that no life is ever taken or sacrificed in vain.”

A cold gust of wind swept over the walls and into the courtyard, and Molasses twitched and shivered.

“We should be on our way now, Sir Andrew,” Sir Bayard announced, rising into the saddle atop Valorous.

“But a moment, Sir Bayard. Never enter the water until an hour after you have eaten, and never enter the water with a storm brewing, for rivers and streams and ponds draw lightning, as do the blue branches of the aeterna tree.”

Bayard muttered something, flicked the reins of his horse. The big chestnut stallion began to move, the pack horse and Molasses following him by instinct. Father walked alongside me, not finished yet.

“Excess of drink before the age of twenty blinds a boy. As does gambling of any sort, or foul language.

“Most of the women you will meet carry knives.”

Despite my fear of what lay ahead of me, of the road that stretched uncertainly beyond the moat house and into the farthest regions of Krynn, where Bayard had some adventure brewing for the both of us—despite all of this, with the clamor and the confusion of dogs and directions, whatever lay waiting at the end of that road seemed less forbidding now. Seemed, you might say, a kind of relief.

A relief, but only until the moat house sank quietly in the darkness behind us, into the morning mists as though it burned, slowly and without flames, on an ocean at midnight. Just when the walls had almost become indistinguishable from the darkness of morning, the tiny form of a man appeared at the battlements. I watched for a moment, as he surely watched us dwindle away from him, from the moat house, from home. Father, perhaps?

Then the shape burst into a sheet of orange fire—a candle in the windows of home.

“Gileandos,” I chuckled, remembering.

A parting shot in return for lectures in a dungeon. All sorts of chemicals can find their way into the pocket of a robe, when one gives a weasel the run of the library.

Already the night birds had begun to hush, and what little sun there was washed the green tops of the vallenwoods with a lighter green, almost a yellow. Occasionally I heard the quarrels of jays above us, and the rising songs of birds I had heard before but never thought about until now. Still, the songs themselves were familiar, so it seemed pleasant in the upper branches, but below the light and noise, the way before us was quiet and dark. It was cold, a morning drizzle had begun, and the road looked dire and unfriendly. The horses moved in single file now, Bayard leading on his stallion Valorous, followed by the pack mare. I brought up the rear on my excuse for a horse. The distance between us widened as the day went on and as Molasses tired. I wished for a mule, but more than that, I wished Bayard would talk, would say something, as my several attempts at conversation had been met with only casual reply.

No doubt his mind was south of here, preparing for the lists at this almighty tournament he was so set on winning.

It was as quiet as a dungeon on the road. As dull as a dungeon, too: the knocking of the horses’ hooves against the rain-spattered ground as regular as the dripping of water in a cell, the air as cold and damp and uncomfortable, the company as listless and silent.

“So . . . ,” I began, and my companion leaned forward in the saddle, looked straight at me, and spoke for the first time in almost an hour.

“Castle di Caela.”

“What?”

“You were going to ask where the tournament will be held, weren’t you?”

“It gives me confidence to know that kind of thing, Sir Bayard.”

He looked back at the road, then once again at me.

“Castle di Caela. A fortnight’s journey from here. In southwestern Solamnia, about halfway between Solanthus and the Vingaard Keep. If we make good time we still have three days before the tournament begins. You can set up our tent, carry my regards to Robert di Caela, and enter my name in the lists.”

“Aren’t you . . .”

“A little old for the lists?” Though he put it bluntly, he had guessed my thoughts. Slowly the drizzle built to an actual rain, and the path ahead of us grew even darker, even more uninviting. “I suppose. But that’s what happens when you court a girl of eighteen. You grapple the eighteen-year-old boys to get her attention.”

He hooded himself against the rising rain.

“Should be a lesson to you,” I muttered unwisely.

Sir Bayard smiled, lowered his face so that the water tunneled down the front of the hood. No longer could I see his expression when he replied.

“And your first lesson should be respect.”

The morning progressed into early afternoon, and the rain showed no intention of letting up. All about us the road was filled with sounds of wetness—the splash of horses’ hooves in standing puddles, the tumble of rain through the leaves and branches of the surrounding trees. After a while these sounds blended into a constant murmur, became a continual rushing sound, as familiar as breathing, so that any unusual movement or noise was more sudden, more disturbing.

Twice something crackled in the underbrush beside the road. Twice I drew my sword and tried unsuccessfully to steer Molasses away from the sound. On the third time Bayard pushed back his dripping green hood and stared at me flatly, disgustedly.

“Badger.”

“Pardon me?”

“Badger. You are drawing your sword in the presence of badgers.”

“How in the world do you know? For sure, I mean.”

“The wise man talks with his ear to the wind,” Sir Bayard answered, drawing a tinderbox from beneath his cloak.

“I shall make a better knight for knowing that, sir.”

“We’ll stop here, rest and eat,” he continued. “I’ll try to wrestle a fire from this quagmire.”

We nestled beneath a huge, spreading vallenwood, our backs to its hoary trunk. Nothing seemed cheerful in this climate; even the crickets and frogs were silent, too stunned by the cold to celebrate the rain they usually loved so dearly, so vocally. Bayard crouched above the tinderbox and removed his gloves. His large hands seemed ungainly in such a delicate task; it was as though he was tying a net for dolls.

“About the tournament . . .” I began. “Who is the lucky noblewoman?”

“Daughter of Sir Robert di Caela, Knight of the Sword. Surely your tutor touched on current politics. You have heard of the House of di Caela?”

“Old Solamnic family,” I repeated from memory, watching a rabbit, soaked and sullen, poke its head out from under a large patch of creeping juniper. It looked as though it had been spat upon or worse. Well, we were birds of a drenched feather, that rabbit and I.

“Old Solamnic family,” I began once more, thinking of my warm room and bed at home. “Founded by Duncan di Caela, cousin of Vinas Solamnus himself. In wartime—brilliant, inventive. In times of peace—brilliant and just. But in generations nearer our time the family di Caela has withdrawn unto itself, for reasons it has chosen never to make public.”

The rabbit ducked back under the juniper. At least he had a burrow nearby, to which he could retreat when the rain grew heavier, the day colder.

“Robert di Caela is the last of the male line,” Bayard added. “For the first time in the recorded history of the family, the di Caela heir is a girl. After Sir Robert, the House of di Caela falls into history and obscurity, if his daughter does not wed. Which is why he has called a tournament.”

Bayard’s new fire smoldered and showed a hint of flame.

“Which is why the younger Solamnic Knights will gather from all across Ansalon—There!”

A fire burned low and steady beside us. Bayard put away the tinderbox, continued.

“Which is why they will gather in tournament, each of them seeking the hand of the Lady Enid.”

“Enid!” I exclaimed, with a little more bitter pleasure than I should have shown. Of all the names in Krynn, Robert di Caela had chosen “Enid” for his daughter? An Enid is almost always a big, square-jawed woman with her hair bound like a loaf of bread.

I mean, what could you expect from an Enid besides excellent pastries?

I began to chuckle. Here I was, practically drowning myself in the miserable midst of nowhere, and all in the service of a knight who had his mind set on winning a tournament where the first prize was a girl named Enid!

Bayard frowned, looked away from me.

“I mean nothing ill by the laughter, sir,” I explained quickly. “Please don’t take umbrage at idle merriment.”

“There is no umbrage to be taken, Galen,” Bayard said calmly, staring up at me with those cold gray eyes.

“Nonetheless, I should appreciate a little more . . . esteem here. After all, I am supposed to marry Enid di Caela.”

It was too much. I laughed the harsh laughter of the doomed, and suddenly Bayard drew his sword. Well, I thought I was done for. I rolled into a ball, started to shout, to offer my birthright, Brithelm’s and Alfric’s birthrights as bribery, but Bayard’s hand clasped quickly and forcefully over my mouth and hushed me. I tried to bite him, but he was holding my mouth shut.

“Quiet, boy!” he whispered, and paused, head raised in the air like a leopard sniffing the switching wind for signs of the quarry. And through the constant sound of the rain I heard movement, a scuffling noise in a stand of fir across the road, some thirty yards away from us.

“Not badger,” Bayard hissed, and loosened his grip on my jaw. He nodded toward my sword, which was all the command I needed. I winked obediently, stole my hand to the grip, as if to pledge my loyalty. But believe me, I had no intention of drawing that weapon as long as there was any avenue of escape, any place to hide. Father had judged my swordsmanship correctly: I was more likely to injure myself or Bayard than any enemy arrayed against us. At that moment, however, I must have looked fierce enough to convince my fool of a companion that I would stand behind him in whatever bloodshed was about to follow. In fact, I was behind him but also considerably above him, for when Bayard turned again toward the source of the sound, I scrambled up the vallenwood to safety, perching in its lower branches where I could see what was about to happen and where I hoped devoutly that nobody—not even Bayard—could see me.

“Who goes there?” arose from the stand of fir. Bayard had been right, unless this was a rather miraculous badger.

“Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, Knight of Solamnia. And who asks my name of me?”

I banged my head in disbelief against the thick vallenwood branch I was straddling. No telling who or what lay concealed across the road, but anyone betting hard-earned money on the situation would wager that it was peasants. Peasants who, if you recall, had never forgiven the Knights of Solamnia for a little thing called the Cataclysm that altered the face of the planet and killed a few million of them in the bargain. More to the point, peasants who would carry more recent memory of the misdeeds done in the very armor that lay atop our pack mare. Yes, a Solamnic Knight would be the last person they’d be ready to step out and welcome.

But step out of the firs they did, one after another, until a full half dozen of them stood in front of Bayard—stern and muddy and rather rough-looking peasants. They were all frowning, all bristling, and each of them brandished a club or an axe or a hammer at least as long as I was tall.

Bayard could have taken any one of them easily. He had cast his cloak over a bush and stood before them, open to the rain and clad only in a leather tunic, his broadsword drawn and resting lightly in his right hand, a short but wicked-looking dagger balanced in his left.

He could have taken any two of them—maybe three—with a bit of a scuffle. But six seemed overwhelming, and they knew it, spreading out as they crossed the road, forming a large and ragged circle around him. I felt sorry for Bayard. I also climbed to a higher branch.

“Knight of Solamnia?” asked one of them—not the largest but certainly the most fierce-looking, sporting a bald pate with a huge red scar down its middle, a trophy from the gods knew what roughhousing. “You did say ‘Knight of Solamnia’ then, didn’t you, sir?”

“And if I did?” Bayard asked, turning slowly, elegantly clockwise, fixing his gaze on each adversary in turn, then passing him by, facing him again as he changed directions, turning counterclockwise. This all happened slowly, like some old and revered ritual or dance. And meanwhile, Bayard and Scar Head talked quietly, cautiously, as the peasants drew nearer and nearer the turning knight.

“Well, if you did, sir,” answered Scar Head, setting his axe upon his shoulder as lightly as he would a cane fishing pole. “If you did, perhaps you kindly misunderstood my question, seeing as Solamnic Knights are not altogether welcome in these parts. Perhaps you are another kind of knight entire, or perhaps you are of a different order that me and my men have not heard of yet, and who we wouldn’t have any hard feelings against, you understand? Karrock?”

He nodded at the man to his left—Karrock, evidently. A big, brutal-looking man with hair as red as mine and a darker beard—that strange combination you often see in folk of our coloring. Karrock moved slowly, but this time definitely, toward the pack mare, stretched out his hand toward the saddlebags.

“I’d stop right there if I were you,” Bayard snapped, striding instantly to within sword’s length of the big man. The peasants tensed. Bayard turned and addressed Scar Head.

“Stop dancing like a philosopher around names, man. If there’s a reason I should hide my service to the Solamnic Orders I’d like to know it now, so I can dispel your illusions.”

“I think this one means it, Master Goad,” Karrock whispered to Scar Head, taking a step back from the mare.

“I just came for militia work, not to tangle with zealots.”

“There’s six of us to one of him,” Goad replied, motioning with his club to the men on his right, who halved the distance between themselves and Bayard, slipping between Molasses and the pack mare. “And you saw what his kind done to the village.”

“’Swhy I’m here, sir,” Karrock nodded.

“I mean,” Goad chuckled coldly, addressing Bayard, “I may not have my letters, but I can count. And even a Solamnic Knight will tell you there’s a certain philosophy in numbers.”

“Militia?” Bayard relaxed a bit, though from the way his shoulders turned I could see he was keeping an eye on the men approaching from Goad’s right. “Then you’re guarding your village? Against what?”

“Against Solamnic Knights such as yourself, sir, who think a suit of armor and a rich family allow them certain . . . liberties that even the old King-Priest of Istar would of had no rights in taking. We had a visit from one of your order several weeks back . . .”

I hugged the branch I lay upon and breathed a silent prayer. But I made sure the prayer was completely silent—not even whispered or breathed. For Karrock had recovered his courage, stepping toward the mare once more, his inquiring hand about to pull the canvas blanket off her back.

Sometimes, as Gileandos taught me in the theology lessons I avoided as much as possible, the gods give unexpected answers to our prayers.

For you see. Molasses was old. Not just getting on in years like a man will say of himself when he turns sixty or even seventy. Molasses was over thirty years old—had been put out to pasture by Father by the time Alfric was born. Molasses was past venerable, past ancient, was pushing fossilized. Remember also that for the last ten years his adventures had been limited to carting small children in an ever-narrowing circle around the moat house courtyard, and that the closest to danger he had been in the last twenty years was within fifty yards of a dogfight broken up in an instant by a quick serving boy. All in all, you can understand why the situation may have seemed a little threatening to the poor horse.

Perhaps you can understand why he fell over dead.

It was just the law of averages catching up. But catching up at just the right time. The heavy thud as the poor old creature collapsed startled the men who were approaching steadily from Ando’s right toward the pack mare standing just to the left of Bayard. The yokels spun about and raised their weapons, expecting that some reinforcements had come to Bayard’s aid, leaping from a tree, perhaps, and landing behind them. They had no idea how quick their opponent was. Bayard vaulted the pack mare, armor and all, and landed heavily, noisily between our baggage and the militiamen. They turned back to him quickly, but it was too late. With the broad side of the blade he slapped one of them heartily on the ribs—it sounded as though someone were beating a rug with the dull thumping sound and the whoosh of escaping air. As soon as he turned, the man was on his knees, gasping.

His comrades paused, stunned, as if something large and supernatural—a dragon or a pillar of fire, perhaps—had risen in their midst. Bayard spun, caught Karrock with a high kick to the chest. The big man grunted and staggered backwards, Bayard moving steadily toward him in a half-crouch. Meanwhile, the rest of the militiamen stood motionless, their hands vaguely about their weapons.

Except Goad. Smoothly, silently, he sidled to his right, moving slowly until he stood astride the sword-whipped man, directly behind Bayard who, intent on discharging Karrock from the local militia, hadn’t noticed at all.

Certainly this was the time for me to do something—at the least to shout a warning to my noble employer, at the most (and I shuddered to think of the most!) to drop from the vallenwood onto the enemy in some kind of heroic plunge.

At the moment I felt that to do either would be too showy. Instead, I sat and watched events unfold. Then a curious thing happened, as if somehow a truce had been arranged out of all of this bluster and threat. Instead of pouncing on Bayard as I was sure he would do, Goad stooped and hoisted his winded comrade to his shoulders. Meanwhile, Bayard had toppled Karrock with a strong punch to the ruddy jaw and was turning to guard his back. His eyes met Goad’s, and it was hard to tell what passed between them besides the nod that seemed to end it, as Goad backed into the stand of firs, as Karrock scrambled to his feet and scurried after his commander, none the worse for combat were it not for a bruise noticeable through the dark beard on the left side of his hamlike face.

Now I leaped down from the vallenwood, rolled a bit in the dust so I would look somewhat the worse for wear, bit my lip—not hard, but hard enough to draw convenient blood—then scrambled to my feet.

“Let that be a lesson to you, affronting a brave Knight of Solamnia,” I shouted. Bayard turned again, this time slowly, and fixed me with a withering gaze. “See to your horse,” he ordered coldly.

As you can guess, there wasn’t much seeing to do on that account. We said our farewells to Molasses, then transferred my belongings to the pack mare, who could hardly be said to be grateful for the additions, and I dreaded receiving the news as to how we would travel the rest of the way to Castle di Caela. I decided to postpone asking, perhaps letting Sir Bayard’s temper cool in the meantime.

The mood and our clothes had been dampened considerably. Bayard returned to the fire, silently insisting that if we were to have lunch, then by the gods, we would have that lunch at that very site. We ate abruptly. Bayard drew dried beef and dried fruit from one of the countless pockets and packs on the mare. The fire, unfortunately, was for warmth, not cooking. It was a dry and dismal meal we had there beside the road and under the vallenwoods, with the horse and the mare shivering beside us and the rain steadily falling. I cast the Calantina for comfort and received two and eight, the Sign of the Horse. As I mulled over this reading, tried to remember the verses that went with the sign, Bayard leaned over my shoulder and spoke.

“And what’s this?”

“Sign of the Horse,” I replied shortly. I wasn’t in the mood to exchange pleasantries with my judge, jury, and executioner.

“I mean . . .”

“The Calantina. Fortune-telling dice from Estwilde.” Maybe he would take that as an answer, go back to his side of the fire, and dry some perfectly edible food into something indistinguishable from the saddlebags you carry it in. After all, we might need our appetites killed once more before we reached the castle.

“Garbage is what it is,” Bayard said softly, drawing his knife and walking toward Valorous.

“I suppose,” I agreed absently.

“Then why do you do it?” he snapped, crouching beside Valorous and lifting the stallion’s front leg.

“Do what?”

“The Calantina, of course. Parlor game in Estwilde. That is, wherever they have parlors. They invented it and don’t take it seriously. Why should you?” He snorted.

“The Calantina provides me with insight on various occasions, Sir Bayard. As to my future, my place in the ever-changing relationship of things. As to my courses of action.”

“Garbage,” he spat again, beginning to clean mud from the hooves of his stallion.

“Garbage?”

“Garbage, Galen.” He smiled. “You know. Offal. Refuse. Ordure.”

Then he turned to me, no longer smiling.

“There are many kinds of magic in the world, boy. This is not one of them.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, leaning back against the vallenwood, my hand still in my pocket, clutching the dice tightly.

“All right,” Bayard said calmly as he reached under Valorous for the stallion’s other front hoof. “All right. What sign did you say you cast?”

“Sign of the Horse,” I muttered, glancing away from Bayard toward the stand of firs, still fancying that the militia might return for our heads at any moment.

“Just what does that mean?” my employer asked, beginning to clean the hoof.

“Could be the journey we’re on. Could be what happened to poor Molasses.”

“Not very definite, is it?” Bayard asked victoriously, moving to Valorous’s hind hooves and chuckling.

“Could mean many things, combined in a way we haven’t discovered yet.” I knew it was weak, but I thought he couldn’t argue with it. I was mistaken.

“Hindsight, Galen. I could litter this road with omens by hindsight. Magic is as rare as a struggle between honest men on this road.”

“But I’ve seen magic, Sir Bayard,” I blurted out, thinking of Brithelm.

“And I’ve seen honest men struggle on this road,” Sir Bayard conceded quietly, intent again on his work.

“Goad and Karrock and the rest of that militia think we are criminals—honestly think so—and that man back in your father’s dungeon hasn’t helped matters on that account.”

He paused, looked directly at me, then turned back to Valorous. He cleaned the fourth hoof, flung the dagger into the ground, where it stuck, then rose to his feet.

“All Goad was doing,” he stated flatly, “was protecting his village against what he imagined was a raiding knight. He hates the Order, probably thinks we’re all rogues and traitors. He has a lot to learn. You have a lot to learn, too, Galen,” he concluded, walking toward the pack mare. “Provided I stay alive long enough to teach it to you.”

I started to retort, to let Bayard know that, as I had it figured, he didn’t have all that much to teach me, and that I was more than willing to learn my lessons elsewhere if he would only escort me to a place free of rain and bullying militia. I started to tell him this, but he stopped in his tracks midway between horses and stared once again at the stand of firs, now almost hidden behind a wall of rain.

“There’s something moving over there again,” he whispered, backing toward Valorous, where his sword lay tied to the saddle.

I followed his gaze out to the line of evergreens, blurred in the gray movement of water. Something was going on across there, but at that distance and in the rain-distorted light I could not tell.

“What is it, sir?”

Bayard remained quiet, eyes fixed on the distance.

“Goad said something about ‘philosophy in numbers.’ Do you suppose it’s the militia, back with more philosophy?”

“If it is, Galen, you’d better take your position in the vallenwood. I expect I’ll need a lookout as direly as I needed one the last time.” Bayard reached out, calmed his horse with the touch of a gloved hand. The calming didn’t work for squires.

“You might try killing a couple of them this time, sir,” I offered. “Just a little something to swing the philosophical advantage in our direction.”

Now Bayard was reaching for his sword. I watched him, waited for him to turn for the weapon so I, in turn, could turn for the vallenwood.

But none of the turns came. For behind Bayard, behind Valorous, I could see four burly fellows, chest high in a small grove of dogwood. Over the rain I could hear the shuffle of hooves on the forest floor. They were no longer bothering with secrecy.

They were mounted, and we were not. Or so it seemed until they crashed through the dogwood branches toward us, when we could also see that they were horses from the waist down.

I thought of the Sign of the Horse as I toppled backwards and saw the trunk of the vallenwood. Then saw its branches only. Then saw not much of anything except grayness and faint light. Finally, I saw nothing at all.

Chapter Five

All of this commotion and I had not yet traveled ten miles from home.

Scarcely ten miles east of the family moat house lay a swamp that extended forty or fifty miles north and south—I didn’t know how far for sure—and circled back upon our property until the moat house and almost all our holdings were bordered by marshlands. Warden Swamp was a lucky accident in the recent Pathwarden past, rising up quickly and unexplainably about a century ago, named for us, though the country folk shortened the name, as country folk will. Though we looked on it with mistrust and with fear, daunted by the rumors that things grew too quickly there, that strange, half-rotten things lurked in its heart, the swamp conveniently surrounded the Pathwarden estate and protected us from the hostility toward Solamnic Knights that had arisen in Ansalon following the Cataclysm.

You all know the story regarding the Fall from Favor. The people of Solamnia, of course, decided that the Knights had known the Cataclysm was coming for years but had been unwilling or unable to warn everyone. This popular sentiment became the excuse to waylay every Knight who passed through their particular part of the countryside.

Nonetheless, it could have been worse for our family during all the noise and persecution. First of all, we never lived in Solamnia proper, where most of the trouble was; we were slightly to the west in Coastlund, protected by our remoteness and, as it turned out, ringed by Warden Swamp. Although many men were eager for Knight-bashing, few wanted to go out of their way or cross dangerous terrain to get their bashes in. So the swamp had been our good fortune—my family’s and mine.

Which is not to say that you’d ever have caught me near the nasty place, with its snakes and crocodiles, and bandits only a little less cold-blooded and a little more human than the reptiles. Until now, I’d always done my best to avoid it.

I awoke on horseback, or so it seemed. For I was draped like a dirty blanket or a saddle, face-down over a broad, dappled back that smelled of sweat and horse. The ground rushed by below me, and the wet afternoon wind whipped across the side of my face.

I shifted my position and tried to sit up in the saddle. But there was no saddle to sit up in. Instead, a rope was bound tightly about my wrists and a strong hand pulled at my hair, restraining me. I twisted, tried to kick against restraints—against the hand, at least—but found no rider where I had every right to expect one. Then I remembered the men-horses crashing toward us through the bushes and the undergrowth. I raised myself as far as I could and looked straight into the burly back and shoulders of one of the creatures. I was draped across what appeared to be a centaur, headed for swamps and for torture most likely. Where was Bayard?

Had they taken him prisoner? Or worse, had he simply backed away and given me over to them while I lay in a faint underneath the vallenwood? Draped across my captor, I sulked bitterly and awaited the trampling that surely would follow. I pictured the man-horses rising high upon their hind legs, brandishing weapons and pummeling me into fodder.

The one who carried me stepped lightly, smoothly for a creature of such size—more graceful, even, than a horse, perhaps because all of that muscle and speed and balance was guided by an intelligence at least equal to that of a human. It was a combination of that natural grace and evidently of knowing the territory, for we moved quickly and impressively toward our destination.

Whatever that destination was. It grows tiresome not knowing your whereabouts. But maybe whereabouts was the least of my worries. Only minutes after I woke, my captor stopped on a rise in the swamp amidst cedar and juniper and aeterna and other evergreens I could not identify. He stood there, breathing only a little heavily, waiting for someone or something, while I tried to scramble into a more comfortable position.

I shuddered. The light in this clearing was shades of green. And menacing. With all those cedars surrounding us, it smelled like a good place to die. The smell of swamp, the faint smell of sweat, and the stronger smell of horse sank beneath the clean odor of evergreen, like when you put soiled clothes back in a cedar chest so the smell sinks into them, so the clothing doesn’t smell like you have to wash it—a boy’s trick that usually keeps you from having to bathe as well.

After a brief look abound the clearing, my captor seated himself, sliding me down his back and onto the moss-covered ground. The moss was thick and soft; still, the tumble jarred me some, and I lay face-down for a moment, recovering my senses before I scrambled to my feet.

The centaur stood over me in a dodging green light, holding a scythe at least seven feet long and as big around as one of my legs. Escape was out of the question.

“We wait until thy master joins us, little one,” the man-horse rumbled. He offered no leverage—no margins for disagreement.

“Are you a centaur?” I asked finally, breath recovered and mud and evergreen needles brushed from my face.

“It is the name used by thy people,” the centaur replied distractedly, staring down a wide path of broken branches and underbrush, expecting arrivals, evidently. I followed his eyes briefly and watched the path cover itself. Watched the brush bend back, the standing water settle and calm on the path itself, watched—

The vines grow back? Reeds growing out of the water?

I marked it off to the tricky light in the clearing and the knock I received when I dismounted. Now the centaur was looking straight at me again. Escape was still out of the question. His eyebrows bristled, dappled brown and white like his back. He was young—only a year or two older than I, if centaurs measured their years as we did. “I thought you were fables,” I murmured, and glanced about the rise, looking for passages small and narrow into the swamp and . . . Safety? Among crocodiles and quicksand and diseases?

Maybe I should take my chances with the big spotted fellow before me. After all, anyone who said his thees and thous sounded a little less like a murderer to me. If he was young, he might be stupid and easy to manipulate. It’s a safe rule to go by, and Agion was no exception to it.

For that was his name, though at the time I couldn’t have cared less. Once he was sure that we were alone for a while, my new companion became talkative, almost breezy. Quickly I received his life story: he was no celebrity within the centaur ranks, but was young and considered a little slow and awkward by his company.

“Indeed, watching over you is the first real duty my elders have given me in this war we’re in,” he stated proudly.

“War? Wait a minute, Agion. What’s this about a war?”

The big creature paused, blushed.

“I might have said too much. My companions will tell thee what thou needst to know, when the time is fitting and proper.” He trotted to a corner of the clearing, peered back into the leaves and mud and darkness. Behind him the moss and grass crushed beneath his hooves grew back readily, unnaturally. I couldn’t get used to it.

“Agion, you don’t dangle statements such as that in front of whoever’s listening, then drop the subject entirely. It’s just not done outside of a swamp somewhere. Civilized people don’t hint when it comes to disaster.”

Agion frowned. “I’m sorry I let fall such news, young sir, but that is my nature, I fear. The others tell me that I squeeze things so hard I drop them.” Suddenly he brightened. “Though they say I am good-hearted.”

Were all centaurs such simpletons? I dearly wished for cards, for seed money. This was another Alfric, without the malice and with two extra legs. I lay back on the grass^ which had grown about an inch since I was deposited there.

Despite what Brithelm had said on our seemingly long-ago walks through the courtyard, apparently some of the rumors about this place were true. Something was strange about the vegetation that altered and grew underfoot. I sincerely hoped it was harmless. Meanwhile, I tried the first of my strategies—a simple and direct one, but who could say there would be time for long explanations?

“If you are good-hearted, Agion—and you seem to be—then maybe you should think of this. I don’t know anything about any war—where it’s taking place or what the sides are, or how not to run into it, even—and here you’ve dropped this torch on the tinder, as they say. I have been separated from my honorable master—by the way, where is he?—and isn’t it kind of your duty to put my troubled thoughts to rest—dismiss the suspense and all?”

Agion walked a few steps down a trail, ducking to avoid the low branches of a pine. He turned about, ducked the branches once more, and returned to the clearing, tracking mud and weeds across the dry ground. Though pulled from their roots, the weeds continued to grow.

“Well? I mean, you’re the one who brought the war up, Agion.”

“Nor should I have done so, little friend.” He squinted down still another pathway into the swamp, as I marveled that he could call me “little friend” after such brief acquaintance, and especially when I would have gladly sold his organs to the goblins for the information he was bent on not giving me. “Now where are they?” he asked impatiently, fidgeting with the enormous, wicked-looking scythe.

“Relax, Agion,” I offered. “You look like a painting of Equestrian Death wielding that thing. Sure you have the right clearing?”

“Passing sure,” Agion replied. “They said to meet at the second outpost if it had not overgrown since we met here this morning and . . . by the gods, I’ve betrayed even more secrets to thee!” He slapped his forehead with a blow that would have left me simple-minded. I had to gain his confidence quickly, before the others arrived. I stood up, walked slowly towards him, talking all the way.

“I don’t know where we are, what the second outpost is, or why they wanted to meet here in the first place. You’ve captured a real blank slate here: I know nothing about the war, what it’s all about, or what damn side the damn centaurs are on, if you’ll excuse my waxing profane and all, but it’s dreadfully frustrating to hear all of this talk about a major world event and not have the foggiest idea as to . . .”

“Th’art rattling, little friend,” Agion cautioned me, raising his scythe in a gesture I mistook for anger. “I think it might be of use for thee to rest thyself a moment, recover thy breath. I can tell thee nothing until suspicion is lifted from thy countenance.” Casually, he sliced branches from the pine tree beside him, so that he could pass under. The branches grew back.

“And what is my countenance guilty of, Agion?”

“Spying, little friend. Had thou been in Solamnic armor, like your friend, we’d have held thee as a prisoner of war—no more. But concealing thy colors is like to spying in wartime.”

I stared woefully up at Agion, who looked down on me with not a little sympathy. A lark sang briefly in the bushes to my left, whether “left” was south or north or whatever. Though the rain was lifting, the situation looked glum and soggy.

“Ah . . . pardon me, Agion, but what’s the common punishment in these parts for spies?”

“My folk seldom wax dramatic, little friend,” the centaur smiled. Then his big face darkened, the spotted eyebrows bunching into one thick line of hair above the bridge of his nose. “For the most part, we drown the poor souls. Take them by their poor little ankles and dangle their poor little faces in pools or in brooks. Facing upstream, of course.

“We suspend them there ‘until they pay the full price for their intrigues,’ as the elders say.”

A pretty grim use of Coastlund’s waterways, if you asked me.

“Does that apply to the young ones, too?”

Agion nodded. “As far as I know. Mind, I’ve never seen a spy put to death, young or old.”

“Does it apply to those dragged unwillingly into espionage—say, those who really have nothing against centaurs, but become spies when it’s a choice between that and death?”

“As I said, little friend, I’ve never seen the putting to death. Nor have I seen any trial where such things are brought to counsel. Truly, I cannot answer thee.”

“Then perhaps you’ve heard things, Agion. Like what is done with someone who informs in a case such as this. Suppose someone were to reveal a network of spies—from mere lookouts and agents among the peasants who live nearby, on up to the ringleaders, some of whom you may already have taken prisoner? And suppose this very cooperative person does so for the promise that his head will not roll when heads roll, or drench when heads drench, if you understand me?”

“I am sure if thou hast such a promise from the elders, thou art safe from harm,” Agion proclaimed seriously.

“But if thou were to uncover a network of spies, thou wouldst betray some of thy friends, no doubt?”

He paused, cocked his head, looked at me curiously.

“That is, of course, if the other two are friends of thine.”

The other two? Friends? I knelt, pretended to pick up something from the ground—a blade of grass, a rock perhaps. I was pretending not to care, though the curiosity was great and I was stringing out my nets blindly, hoping that somehow Agion would stumble in.

“So you caught us all, then? I mean, all three of us?”

The centaur’s mouth was off and running before his brain awoke.

“Only the two for the time being. Thee and the Knight thou servest, though he was much more difficult to bring to ground, judging from the fact that my companions are late in joining us here.

“As for the third, he escaped us up the road. He was the one we saw first, but on open plains too near that Solamnic moat house and at such a distance that we could not hope to capture him. So we found the two of thee, hoping that perhaps all three would be together when we overtook the Knight himself—that the lookout thou settest so cunningly a mile at thy rear would betray thy whereabouts in the hurried attempt to warn thee.”

Agion gave me a puzzled look. I nodded for him to continue. I was thunderstruck by the news of a third spy, but determined not to show it.

“Else the armor might well have been hidden,” he said, “for we had intended to watch thee only, until we heard the Solamnic talk with the militia. Then we had to close with thee, to search thee for what we suspected we would find—and did.”

For now I was sure someone was following us.

I remembered the dark recesses of the library, the movement of dark wings.

Who else could the third man of Agion’s story have been?

So what if I escaped these four-legged kidnappers? Who knew what other forms of mayhem awaited me?

Had Bayard not entered the clearing at that moment, escorted by half a dozen centaurs, I might have tried to strike a bargain with Agion, offering him money, land, half the moat house to escort me safely back to Father’s disfavor and a place of honor in his dungeon—damp and dark and infested with bullies, but safe from scorpions, at least.

Apparently Bayard had not come easily. One of the centaurs nursed an arm in a sling, another a bloodied nose. Nor did Bayard look much better himself—the right side of his face swollen and discolored, his left hand bleeding and clutched in his right, which had little else to do, the centaurs having tied his wrists together. His wrists were burned by the tightness of the ropes.

Without ceremony, the centaurs pitched him to the floor of the clearing, then encircled us both. Lying in a bruised heap on the ground, Bayard smiled ruefully up at me and staggered to his feet.

“It is here and now thou wilt answer for thy conduct, Solamnic,” one of the centaurs proclaimed—a burly specimen whose skin was dark and weathered like a cypress tree. His hair was white, also, but unlike Agion’s, white with age and if not with wisdom, at least with a certain badlands cleverness. Swamp-smart, you might call him.

Apparently the old fellow was the leader. He looked as though he were accustomed to being answered. But Bayard had been jostled a little too much, it seemed. There were cracks showing in his courtesy as he rose to his full height and faced the old centaur.

“For my conduct it is easy to answer, sire. It is that of a Solamnic Knight when he and his squire are attacked without warning—and I might add, without reason—by seven folk who are supposed to be allies of the good and the just. That’s my answer, sire—quite simple and direct, I grant you, but when your men ambushed me, I assumed we had passed beyond formal introduction.”

I believe the old centaur smiled.

“So thou doest admit,” the old fellow asked, “thy allegiance to the Solamnic Orders?”

Despite my gestures, my throat-clearing, my elbow in his ribs. Bayard answered as he had before—in all honesty.

“‘Admit’? Nay, I proclaim it, sire! For despite what you have heard, the Order still’ stands for principles noble and true in a time unprincipled. Stop elbowing me, Galen!”

“And the armor?” the old centaur asked, staring me down with his wild green eyes, glittering like emeralds on leather.

“The armor is mine,” Bayard maintained, “though stolen from me briefly days ago, and worn by one for whose crimes I cannot answer.” He folded his arms across his chest and awaited the centaur’s response. Which was as I had feared.

“Sir Knight, if thy testimony stood against only what I have heard, by my troth I should be inclined to lenience. But there is the matter of the satyrs, and in that matter the testimony of mine eyes is witness against thee, and the eyes of my brothers have also looked upon thy misdeeds.”

“Satyrs?”

Bayard looked at me in puzzlement. I shrugged. What did I know from satyrs?

“The satyrs!” the old centaur continued. “The goat-men!”

Several of his traveling companions nodded roughly in agreement, shaking their manes in a most menacing fashion. Bayard paused, then spoke frankly.

“I promise you, sire, that I know nothing of what you call ‘satyrs.’ Indeed, the very word is new to me. And I promise you that I had never raised my hand against you or your people, until you rode out from hiding a brief while ago upon the road.”

The old centaur inclined his enormous, shaggy head, whispered to the bloody-nosed captain at his right, and the two of them galloped off to the far edge of the clearing. Two more joined them shortly—to my relief, neither was the one whose arm Bayard had disjoined in the recent struggle, for I was sure that whatever was to be done to us was soon to be put to a vote. A lively discussion began, but I could hear nothing from where I stood. I could do nothing from where I stood, either. So I reached into my pocket, sat down, and cast the Calantina. The grass was ankle high by now, and I had to brush it aside to read the dice. Six on twelve: Sign of the Goat. I consoled myself that the virtue of the goat was that he could survive just about anywhere under just about any circumstances. I hoped that applied to swamps and captivity, because I saw us staying here awhile.

“What do your tea leaves say, Galen?” Bayard whispered, seating himself painfully beside me.

“They say that sometimes the whole truth is a foolish thing to tell, sir,” I lied. “But then, you’ve told me you don’t believe the Calantina, anyway.”

The centaurs who were left to guard us seemed more informed than we were. Two of them inspected us from a distance, brandished their clubs, and grinned maliciously. Only Agion remained friendly, and it was fairly obvious nobody was listening to him.

“Don’t worry,” he encouraged me, as he picked several of the small, glittering nuts from the blue-needled branch of an overhanging aeterna tree and dropped them into his mouth. “Archala never delivers punishment unjustly.”

Of course, that did nothing to lighten my worries. Far better that this Archala not deliver punishment at all, for I did not care whether he disciplined justly or unjustly, as long as I escaped intact. I considered telling Bayard about the third party—the man the centaurs had seen following us a mile or so back down the road. But what would I tell Bayard about who I thought was following us? What would I tell him about the honey-voiced man who scaled the moat house on a mission of burglary?

To be quite honest, I had no real desire to clear my conscience before the centaurs turned me up by my ankles and drowned me for espionage. Sometimes the whole truth is a foolish thing to tell. So we sat there in silence, Bayard rubbing his bruises and I thinking frantically of ways to dodge judgement. Any judgement. But since nobody was moving or scuffling or breaking branches, the sounds of the swamp resumed—the weird songs of unfamiliar birds, now and again the bellow of a bullfrog or the whirring sound of an insect, for these animals had come from hiding when the rain had stopped and the sun had emerged. Around us the air was warmer, but still terribly heavy and humid. Though you could not see the plants growing—not really—you could look away from one and look back in a matter of minutes to find it larger . . . or what you thought was larger. It gave me the jumps.

I thought of what Gileandos had said about Warden Swamp: something that grows so rapidly grows like a boy; therefore it cannot be trusted, pointing to it on the map as it stretched for miles south of the moat house. Of course, stories had come to us through the peasants, stories of animals who had grown to unnatural size or changed unnaturally and roamed the recesses of the swamp. There was talk of legless crocodiles, and huge carnivorous birds, eyeless because they no longer needed eyes in the swamp’s green darkness, moving clumsily but swiftly among cedars and among cypress trees by leaps and lunges, their wings useless in a country covered by branches and leaves.

There was talk, of course, of the man-eating flying fish.

Now, there may not have been a great deal of truth to such stories, but other things were undoubtedly true. I knew them firsthand. For we had lost peasants, servants, and on occasion a visitor or two in the dark hollows of the swamp. Indeed, a band of visitors—a party of five dwarves from Garnet who came to visit Father the summer I was seven—had reached the far edge of the swamp when they decided to lie down and pass the evening in safety before continuing a journey they figured would be too dangerous in the dark. They awoke the next morning to find themselves surrounded by swamp, which had reached out to cover them in the night. Two of their party were missing, and though Father combed the outskirts of the swamp that afternoon and again the following morning, combed it with servants and torches and dogs and shouting, we never heard what befell those dwarves, nor anyone else who strayed into the swamp and lost his way. Such events brought about healthy respect, even a fear, for the green swath Gileandos had marked on the map in his study, the spot he enlarged every spring as the marsh swallowed the countryside. That night we slept fitfully. Several times I woke to see Bayard pacing at the edge of the clearing and at the edge of the light from our small fire, his hands clasped behind him as though they were tied together. There were no stars visible beneath this canopy of leaves and vines, so the night was dark without and within. After finally getting to sleep in the early morning, I awoke to see Bayard crouching over me, looking down upon me pensively.

“Sir?”

“Galen, if tomorrow brings some form of. . . severe punishment . . .”

For a second my spirit soared. I hoped devoutly that my companion’s innate nobility would compel him to bear the weight of that punishment, no matter how severe, and find a sly loophole by which he might send me unscathed back to Father. However, his nobility compelled him toward other things.

“If that severe punishment does come, I shall rest easily knowing you did not misunderstand something I said.”

“Yes, sir?”

“About the Lady Enid.” He slowly began to stand.

“About your betrothed, sir?”

“Yes. And that’s it. For you see, the Lady Enid isn’t really my betrothed.”

“No?”

“I mean, I’m not engaged to the Lady Enid or anything.”

I had been wakened for this?

“But you said you were ‘supposed to marry her.’”

“But not engaged,” Bayard emphasized, then turned to face the opposite end of the clearing, where another small fire glowed and where the centaurs still deliberated.

“It’s more like destined.”

I was awakened by a rough jostling. I started to shout to the servant, to Alfric, to whoever it was to begone and leave me until a reasonable time—say, well after noon. But I looked up through the dusky green light into the stern and bearded face of a centaur, and remembered my bearings and my manners. Bayard stood between Agion and the centaur whose arm had been injured in yesterday’s struggle. My bearded companion fell in behind us as Agion took me by the shoulder, as the injured centaur took Bayard by the back of his tunic, and as we were half-carried, half-led to the opposite end of the long clearing, where judgement awaited.

Our escorts deposited us at the feet of Archala and the other centaurs with whom he had taken counsel. The fellow whose nose Bayard had bloodied in the scuffle was a herald of some sort. He scowled at us, wiped the blood from his upper lip, and started to speak.

“All things stand against thee,” he proclaimed, in a honking voice transformed, surely, by the sorry state of his nose. I would have found the honking funny, would have laughed, no doubt, had the message been other than that all things stood against me.

“The armor, we fear, is terrible, strong evidence,” he stated. Then he paused, and you could tell by the look on his face that he was delighted that someone who had altered his nose was liable to search and seizure.

“And yet,” the herald continued with what was obviously the bad news for him, “Archala persisteth in the old laws, according to tradition, according to his wisdom. For he saith that thy words arise from an honest heart and countenance unfeigned.”

It galled the others to no end, I could tell, that the jury was still out. Except Agion, who watched the proceedings in admiration from a distance.

“Nonetheless,” brayed the herald, clearly favoring his nose by now, “nonetheless, the question of the satyrs, of thine alliance with the satyrs, troubles us all.”

“No more than it troubles us, Master Archala,” Bayard interrupted, looking past the speaker and addressing the old centaur himself. “Especially since, as I said before, we know nothing of these satyrs or goat-men or whatever you call them. Nor why you suspect our alliance with someone we do not know.”

“I need not be reminded that thou hast spoken to the issue already, Sir Knight,” Archala replied, smiling patiently. “Of course, thou wilt understand why we remain . . . in doubt of such explanations when among the ranks of the satyrs—indeed, in a position of command as we saw it across lines of raised weapons—rode a knight dressed in the very armor thou carried upon thy pack mare when first we met thee on the road.”

Bayard started to protest, but Archala raised his enormous hand, signaled for silence, and continued.

“But thine armor was stolen. As thou sayest. It was away from thee briefly. As thou sayest. Within which time, of course, the thief could have taken up with our enemies.

“As thy story would have us believe. Surely, Sir Knight, thou canst see why I refuse to hang the fate of my people on the breezes. Still, our verdict as to thy guilt or innocence awaits the test of seven days and seven nights, during which thou shalt stay with us, under our watchful eyes and guard. Perhaps by then we shall see how thy presence within our midst affects the satyrs.”

Well, Archala’s judgement pleased no one.

The centaurs stood behind Archala, obviously more than ready to grab us by the ankles and find the nearest source of water. I’d have bet a fortune that Agion would be our guard, as nobody else wanted the job. Bayard was sure we would be found innocent, for the simple and foolish reason that we were innocent. Naturally, he was furious at the delay, for the tournament at Castle di Caela began in scarcely more than two weeks’ time, and any suitor absent from opening ceremonies . . . well, one doesn’t stand up a rich man’s daughter.

Even so, I admit I was surprised—even though nobody else was—when Bayard offered to mediate between centaur and satyr.

“Mediate?”

Archala blustered at the offer, that wise and tolerant smile gone almost immediately, replaced by one I didn’t like nearly as well. “I suppose thou wouldst want to negotiate a peace settlement with them?” he added ironically.

“In fact, sire,” Bayard responded, “a peace settlement may not be possible without you. Perhaps I could set the groundwork—a temporary truce, for instance—and then you and your counsel, and the leader of the satyrs and his counsel, might meet in a neutral spot . . .”

“Archala, we have respected the old ways quite long and quite faithfully,” the herald interrupted, his nasal voice suddenly brittle and cold. “If thou hast designs . . .”

But Archala raised his knotted hand, and the clearing was once again silent.

“Surely thou art not so foolish,” the old centaur began, addressing Bayard, but then stopped, turned slowly away from us, muttering strangely to himself.

Bayard and I glanced at one another in puzzlement. Bayard started to speak, to ask what was troubling Archala, or so I suppose.

But it was at that time that Agion offered to guide us to the camp of the satyrs—as “an emissary of peace,” he claimed, adding, too, that he believed Bayard’s story.

Archala ceased muttering and stared at the big innocent.

“But that is just what the Solamnic wants, Archala,” the herald bleated. “An escort to his own lines and to safety!”

“But what if I’m telling the truth, Archala?” Bayard implored. He had no intention of missing the tournament.

Archala thought about it.

“Leave the boy with us, Solamnic,” urged the herald, “as surety of thy good intentions.”

“Absolutely not!” Bayard exclaimed. “This is my squire, and as such he belongs with me, not with you as hostage to your fears and mistrust.”

The herald snorted and bristled, but Bayard stood his ground. A half-smile spread over his face, and he regarded the huge and menacing creature with an indifference that danced on the edge of contempt. For a long time nobody spoke. Something shrieked far back in the swamp—a small animal, a bird perhaps—and the pools around the clearing rippled as even smaller creatures sought safety in the waters and the deep mud.

Then, Archala raised his russet arms and nodded at Bayard. The herald sputtered, but an icy glance from the old centaur stilled his clamor.

But for the life of me, I could not find a way out of the proposition as they set me on Agion’s back and the two of us rode beside Bayard and Valorous out of the clearing, in search of the satyrs, the light becoming greener and greener around us until even my hands looked like leaves.

Behind us the vines were reclaiming the trail.

Chapter Six

Passing through the swamp was like traveling in a glass bottle: the stillness, the closeness, the light filtered green by the leaves overhead. And the strange feeling that the leaves and even the stillness and closeness were somehow transparent—that we were watched from behind them.

For I was sure that we were being followed.

This feeling of uneasiness changed little as we traveled farther into the swamp. I caught myself no longer noticing the sudden hush of animals as we passed by, mainly because the marshes were quiet for miles around us now. It was the first of several bad signs. Wherever we went, it was as though the swamp had been startled by something minutes before we got there.

Early in the journey, the centaur took the lead. Bayard followed on foot, leading our two remaining horses through the unsure footing of the swamp. That arrangement seemed reasonable to Bayard and to Agion himself, the only one of us who had any idea where we were going. Unfortunately, I was on Agion’s back when the decision was made. I didn’t like the idea of being the trailblazer. But given the choice between riding at the front of the party and walking beside Bayard, I chose reluctantly to ride. After all, an ambush could strike any of us, from in front or from behind, but quicksand and crocodiles struck from below, and they would be so busy with the first thing they came to—centaur or horse—that the rider would have a chance to escape. As we traveled, Agion labored us with stories.

“Some of the elders remember the times before there were marshes here,” he began, “but I spent my earliest days gathering herb and root in these very mires. Many’s the time I remember gathering figwort and purple medic with my Aunt Megaera, she who always told me, ‘Agion, purple medic follows the dove, figwort the pigeon’ . . .”

“This is all very fascinating, Agion,” I interrupted, looking desperately back at Bayard, whose attention was on the trail in front of him solely.

“Yes, but there’s more, Master Galen,” the centaur continued. “Aunt Megaera and I once had to fight a nest of bees away from the purple medic when we were making winter poultices and the compresses the older centaurs use for the arthritis. Dozens of bees there were, with the nagging bite of the horsefly and what is always worse with bees, the swelling afterwards. And Aunt Megaera says . . .”

Agion began to chuckle.

“She says . . . Oh! but she was a caution!”

His loud laughter shook the environs. A pack of small marsupials leaped shrieking from a nearby dwarf vallenwood and scurried off into the recessed green darkness. Bayard looked at me uncomfortably, his hand on his sword.

“Agion,” he interrupted, softly and urgently. “Remember we’re traveling toward hostile ground.”

“Right thou art, Sir Bayard,” said Agion, not much more softly. “But listen to what Aunt Megaera said, when we came out of the medic patch, our flanks swollen and knotted with bee stings.”

Bayard raised his eyebrows, politely attentive. His hand was still on his sword.

“She says . . . Oh! such an oddity she was!” And he began to laugh again. “She says, ‘It is a blessing tonight we sleep standing up!’”

By an unspoken agreement, Bayard and I steered him away from further stories about his life before he met us, which we had soon discovered to be not only boring but noisy. Instead, we asked more and more about the satyrs, and found out, to our dismay and irritation, that the centaurs—or at least this particular centaur, who didn’t strike me as all that knowledgeable—in fact, knew little more than we did.

“You don’t even know where they come from?” Bayard asked, for the first time showing a little impatience like a dent in that righteous spiritual armor. It was about the fifth question in a row to which Agion had no answer.

“It is simply as I told thee, Sir Bayard,” the centaur insisted, brushing something small, buzzing, and irritating from the bridge of his nose. “The satyrs have been here awhile—a month or two, I suppose, though even that is difficult to tell for certain.

“When they first arrived, we thought they were legendary creatures. Those from stories of the way things were before the Cataclysm. Thou rememberest the little goat-footed pipers in the story of Paquille?”

Bayard and I looked at one another. Neither of us had any idea.

“Of course, we tried to befriend them,” Agion went on. “We thought they were something from the old time, when it is said that the races of Krynn were bound more closely to the land and the animals who dwelt upon it. It made us yearn for things past.”

Bayard and Agion traveled awhile in silence, until I grew tired of the suspense.

“Go on, Agion. What happened when you tried to befriend these creatures?”

“As thou canst see, little friend, it was ill-fated,” Agion continued sadly. “At first, the satyrs kept a distance. They snarled. They brandished weapons.”

“I would have taken those as not very favorable signs, Agion,” I interrupted dryly. Bayard hissed my name, then shot me a scolding look. I sneered at Bayard, then softly, almost sincerely, urged the centaur to continue. Which he did, after a moment’s pouting.

“But we thought they were only being cautious in a new country,” he said apologetically. His big tail slapped his rump, swatting at some buzzing thing. Something screamed in the distance to our right, and I nearly jumped from Agion’s back, but neither the centaur nor Bayard seemed alarmed. Instead, they seemed almost relieved that something had broken the increasingly heavy silence of the marsh.

For they, too, had noticed the silence.

“As I said, we thought them only cautious,” Agion repeated. “At least until they killed two of our folk.”

“This is the part of the story I have awaited eagerly,” I said. “For I dearly love stories of murder set in the very surroundings I am passing through when those stories are told.”

“Dost thou want me to cease the telling? It is passing sorrowful, I grant thee, but also passing strange, and worthy the regard of those who will hear it.”

“Then tell the story, Agion,” Bayard urged, as we approached a menacing pool of murky water lying in the middle of the road. The water bubbled as Agion and I stepped over it, then calmed to a few narrowing ripples, then bubbled and boiled again as Bayard reined Valorous around it. Then the pool calmed once more as the pack mare, bringing up the rear of our little group, stepped by sure-footedly.

“I was not there when the killings took place,” the centaur said, reaching out cautiously with the end of his scythe to touch a vine dangling into the path ahead of us. Assured at last that it was a vine, he sliced it neatly from the branch where it hung, then ducked as he passed beneath the branch. “But I heard the story from Archala himself, who is always truthful of sight, truthful of telling. Here is what he told me.

“Six of us there were: Archala and Brachis and Elemon and Stagro the Younger and Pendraidos and Kallites. Six captains set off at high summer, to the middle of the marshes to deal for peace and friendship with the newcomers, the goat-men.”

Though I can stand the occasional tale of murder or war or other arbitrary bloodletting, I hate stories of mysterious death, especially when told to me in a mysterious and desolate place. Agion, on the other hand, told the grisly yarn with delight and with relish. It turns out that a good number of the stories the centaurs choose to remember and tell again end in the mysterious death of most, if not all of the characters. I didn’t know at the time, but casualties were light in this one.

“Six of us there were,” Agion chanted, “and four stories only that returned to high ground out of the fenlands.

“The first was that of Archala, leader of soldiers, the eldest, who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon, who saw nought else but the falling, heard nought but the cries. Then saw the Solamnic Knight riding away.

“The second was that of Pendraidos the surgeon, who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon, who saw no wounds on their bodies, until we were like to believe there had been no wounding, that nought had come to pass but their great hearts giving. He, too, saw the Solamnic Knight riding away.

“The third was that of Stagro the Younger, the archer, who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon, and yet who saw no enemy, hearing his friends cry out, hearing the cries of the satyrs answer mockingly, hearing one cry above all of them, that one cry raised in a rich and musical and honeyed laughter, while Kallites and Elemon thrashed in pain amid the leveled reeds of the swamp. Then heard he, Stagro the archer, his friends cry out a last time in pain and in mortal wounding. And saw the Solamnic Knight riding away.”

Bayard frowned. He inclined his head forward to hear the details. Something about honeyed laughter gave me pause. I thought of the Scorpion.

“The fourth was that of Brachis the huntsman, who kept the dogs of Archala, who saw no falling, but . . .”

It happened quickly. Indeed, so quickly I barely had time to panic and take flight. Valorous snorted, then shied from some bushes at our left, which suddenly began to churn and boil like the pools of water we had passed near the edge of the clearing. It looked as though the bushes were being chewed, shredded by something enormous and invisible.

Agion raised his scythe and turned quickly. Far too quickly, in fact, for his rapid movement threw me from his back, dropping me in weeds and in six inches of standing water.

Bayard had almost tumbled himself, Valorous’s great tug at the reins pulling him off the ground. With an oath, he let go of the stallion, who leaped to the side of the trail and stopped, facing the movement in the underbrush. In the process, the rein by which Bayard had kept the pack mare following us snapped cleanly in two when the mare tugged upon it in panic. The pack mare shrieked wildly, kicked out at nothing I could see, then lumbered headlong into the swamp—probably gone for good.

Not that I had time to worry as to the whereabouts of the mare. For battle had been joined, or so it seemed. Bayard and Agion slashed their weapons through the air, through an air that shimmered and danced about their blades like they were trying to cut water. But that was all the enemy I saw, that eccentric shimmer of air. That is, until I scrambled to my feet and back onto the path.

There were four satyrs in the center of the road, locked in deadly combat with my two companions. I blinked rapidly and backed away, still at a loss as to how these things had arisen out of so much swirling air. Husky fellows the satyrs were, and even uglier than the description “goat-men” would make you imagine. True, they were horned, their lower bodies covered in patchy, filthy hide. True, they had short, ratty tails and were hoofed. True, I could smell them from where I stood. But more than that, their faces were layered with bone and skin, their features resembling not so much those of a goat—who can be a noble-looking animal, even when he isn’t all that pretty—as they resembled the features of giants or hideously deformed men. More to the point, all four of them were clutching knives and short spears, bearing down on our party. It seemed to me we were overmatched.

If a strapping young creature like Agion and a skilled and seasoned fighter such as Bayard had little chance to defeat whatever it was that was attacking them, I certainly couldn’t see how they would suddenly triumph when joined by a skinny, weasel-faced boy carrying a glorified long knife.

So I crouched at the edge of the trail while my comrades waded into the enemy. Bayard stepped around the spear-thrust of the foremost satyr and gave the creature a solid kick to the backside. The satyr tumbled over into the tall grass at the side of the path, but not before Bayard’s foot sank—or seemed to sink—ankle-deep in its back.

Bayard cried out—not in pain and certainly not in fear, but in surprise. As he did, a second satyr leaped onto his back, dagger bared, groping for his throat.

Agion, seeing the mortal struggle, dropped the two satyrs he was holding overhead, one in each hand. The goat-men hit somewhere in the rushes, where they bleated, thrashed about, and then lay still. Then the centaur lunged forward and plucked the assailant from Bayard’s back.

The satyr struggled, shrieking as Agion lifted him high in the air, shook him like a terrier shakes a rat, then hurled him a good five yards in the direction his comrades had fallen. There was a crashing sound and a silence, followed by the sound of reeds and rushes being trampled under as something—maybe several somethings—staggered away.

Again the swamp was silent, except for the occasional call of a bird. The whir of the crickets resumed. So much for our mission of peace.

My companions relaxed and took stock of the first assault. Agion dusted his hands dramatically and nodded at Bayard, who sighed wearily, sheathing the sword he had not used. He walked toward Valorous, stroked the big stallion’s mane, and whispered something in Old Solamnic.

Only then did he remember.

“The pack mare! She’s gone, and she’s carrying my armor!”

It was then that the swamp—so quiet for the last hour or so—burst into sound, and I wondered what it was I had despised so in the silence. On all sides of me arose terrible noises—bird calls fashioned in the throats of things that were certainly not birds, but were by no means human. Something in the calls was amused, was taunting, and I thought that I heard my name, though I was so afraid I might well have fashioned it out of nonsensical sound.

I remembered the darkened library, wondered if there were ravens in the chorus. Bayard glanced around quickly, his thoughts turned to finding the source of the strange clamor. Silently, efficiently, he pointed to Agion, then toward the rushes to the left side of the trail. The big centaur nodded again, and lumbered off in that direction, soon lost amid the dense greenery. Now it was my turn. Bayard pointed at me, and motioned off to the right.

“I beg your pardon?” I whispered.

“Oh, Galen, just get off the trail about ten yards or so and take up a position! Guard our flank over there.”

“Guard? I’m not sure I heard you correctly. You did say ‘guard,’ now, didn’t you?”

Bayard rolled his eyes and, drawing his sword and hoisting his shield in front of him, started up the trail.

“By Huma’s lance! Just . . . call out if you see anything.”

Reluctantly I stepped off the trail to my right. Cattails and stray branches slapped across my face, and once or twice I stumbled, tangled by the vegetable kingdom underfoot. My last sight of the trail was that of Bayard rushing toward the noise, crouched low and moving swiftly like some spectacular panther. I, on the other hand, cut a less predatory figure. Ten feet at most away from the trail, I pushed the reeds aside to stumble upon a tiny clearing, complete with a rotten log and two stagnant pools of water. Again the swamp fell into a curious silence, the calls and cries fading as quickly as they began into the more natural noises of the swamp: now midges whined around my ears, and overhead the deep and mysterious quiet of the sky was broken only by the cry of a raven.

I drew my little sword, figuring that noise or no noise, it might well come down to steel and close quarters, and that perhaps even I would have to join in the production. Better steel and close quarters than captivity. Time passed—too much time. In the midst of my worrying came a noise nearby—a loud rustling of leaves and underbrush. Quickly I began to dig into the swampy ground, hoping I would have time to bury myself and escape detection. But the ground was too wet; the hole filled with water as rapidly as I dug it, and it was dawning on me that whether they found me guilty of spying or not, the centaurs were about to get me drowned. Then Bayard came out of the leaves and branches, his right hand clutching a sword, his left urgently signaling for my silence. In a crouch he moved quickly toward me and knelt at my side.

“Where have you been!” I exploded, my whisper rising to full voice and almost to a shout before his gloved hand slapped over my mouth and muffled me.

“You are all right, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Well, actually, no. It’s this leg of mine, sir. I fear that it’s broken or otherwise damaged. If you have a way to escape, I suppose I could brave the pain and follow. Otherwise, the leg’s no good—completely useless for rushing a position or most any other kind of attack you have in mind.”

“Then you’re intact,” Bayard whispered. “You must get over your romance with concealment, Galen.”

“So I shall, sir, when our enemies get over theirs.”

Something whistled, fairly near us but still from the other side of the trail.

“Agion,” Bayard explained, nodding in the direction of the sound. “Galen, they’re everywhere around us. They know the country here, know how to fight in the swamp. For the life of me, I scarcely saw what hit me when they ambushed us. What’s more, we’re surely outnumbered, and judging from the noise they’re making, outnumbered at impossible odds.”

“That lifts my spirits, sir. Perhaps we should regroup? I could ride Agion back to the centaur lines. My leg would bother me less upon horseback. The odds will not change in our favor if we stay here.”

“Retreat is simply not an option,” Bayard said doggedly, leaning his forehead against the oak, closing his eyes.

“Then what are we to do?”

Bayard opened his eyes, frowned at me, then rose to a crouch.

Again something whistled from the opposite side of the trail—this time more loudly, more urgently.

“Something’s brewing over there,” Bayard concluded. “No doubt Agion has spotted them.”

He rose to leave, and I to follow, but he turned and motioned me back to the spot where he had found me.

“Things are about to be nasty.”

He glanced briefly, humorously at my sword.

“I suspect you’re not . . . accomplished with weaponry. But you can shout a warning if a warning is needed.

“So watch this ground in case they come in behind us.”

With those encouraging words he was off, slipping quietly into the green tangle behind me, and I set myself to the job of staying put.

Which is not the easiest of jobs, considering you are tempted to do anything but wait. The day moved on into late afternoon, and for a while the sounds seemed close. Within the calls back and forth, within the braying, the bleats, the occasional whistles and shrieks, I could hear traces of words, but never enough to make out even a sentence, a statement. It was as though what the satyrs were saying was made of marsh fire, always a step or two beyond earshot.

I sat for what must have been an hour, swatting insects and dreading everything imaginable and some things beyond imagining. The noises rose and faded, rose and faded, until finally the swamp lay quiet. I began to wonder just where Bayard was—why I had heard nothing from him. I was tempted to stand and break cover, then thought better of it. I knew how a turtle must feel in his shell, playing the complex guessing game of when it was safe enough to expose your neck.

Then something shrieked, harsh and terrible, somewhere far off to my right. It was as if a raven’s wing had brushed by my face, bringing the cold scent of night and death.

This was no place to be when the darkness came. I rose to my feet and began to walk, wandered in a nightmarish circle for what must have been the longest few minutes of my life, then crashed out of the undergrowth onto the path, which I knelt and kissed in an ecstasy of relief.

I began to walk in the direction Bayard had gone—or the direction I thought Bayard had gone. Slowly, more familiar sounds resumed as the green of the leaves darkened and blurred with approaching dusk. Somewhere behind me a brace of frogs called one to another; an owl awakened. Eventually, the swamp became loud, almost lively. I was tempted to seek cover, to leave the trail for good. To shelter myself while there was still enough light to take shelter by.

But as I deliberated, as I looked as far as I could into the swamp at my right, all the sound stopped off to my left. I picked up my sword again, watched as the reeds and evergreens parted in that direction, and waited for them to bubble and spin and boil as they had right before the ambush. I was relieved when they did not. Agion thought there were three of us. Someone else had crossed into this mire. I thought of the Scorpion and of how this place was quiet and out of the way.

Or perhaps Archala had changed his mind. Perhaps we were confirmed spies now. Perhaps we were already sentenced.

Indeed, of all those I suspected or expected, the last was Brithelm.

But it was Brithelm, indeed, my elder brother who sat in the air above a mattress, eyes closed and dog whistle clutched tightly in his hand. His face lit up as he saw me and he shouted “Galen!” so it could be heard throughout the swamp, even back at the moat house, perhaps, reaching the ears of the satyrs who were not far away, no doubt seeking my whereabouts while slowly, lovingly sharpening their weapons. Brithelm walked toward me, unaware of satyrs and of ambush, unaware of even darker dangers and of the sad fate that befell Kallites and Elemon. From across the pathway, from somewhere safe under cover, I heard Bayard (who was pathetically nearby, as it turned out) shout, “Stay down!” And hearing the shout, Brithelm brightened even more.

“My little brother. Happy in the service of Sir Bayard of Vingaard. Allow me first to greet the Knight, as is only proper and customary. Then we shall have a brotherly talk.”

With that, Brithelm was past me, striding quickly across the path, Sir Bayard and Agion shouting at him from somewhere in front of him and I shouting from behind him. But he didn’t listen to a thing we shouted, intent as he was on greeting the Knight “as is only proper and customary.” I started to run after him and grab him but, hearing movement in the underbrush to my right, thought better of it and slid quickly off the path. Thinking better of it and sliding probably saved my life.

Two satyrs, armed with small but wicked-looking hatchets, leaped out of the underbrush and bore down upon Brithelm.

Who had not seen them. Who was still walking casually down the path.

I was paralyzed, as though I were watching one of those huge, hypnotic snakes brimming with poison, which the men of Neraka mail in baskets to one another during times of political upheaval. I saw movement across from me; saw Bayard for a second as he began to rise, to go to my brother’s rescue; saw a strong arm—probably Agion’s—drag him back.

Saw Brithelm pass through the satyrs unharmed. Saw the weapons wave ineffectively through the air. Saw the satyrs blend back into hiding so quickly that it seemed they had vanished from the spot. Brithelm had noticed nothing.

He continued walking casually down the path, then turned, parted the reeds with his arms, and shook hands with a thunderstruck Bayard, then with an equally thunderstruck Agion. Then Bayard stepped into the clearing, the centaur behind him, neither of them taking his eyes off my brother.

Since the satyrs had temporarily dispersed, I came out, too.

We stood around Brithelm, agape. Brithelm looked from one of us to the next, smiling, nodding—you almost hated to break the news to him that he had been assaulted.

I finally broke the silence, addressing my commander, the supposed brains of this rapidly unraveling operation.

“You figure this one, sir.”

“First, we should get back off the path,” Bayard insisted. “The satyrs may return at any moment.”

“If they do, we can always hide behind Brithelm,” I offered.

Bayard shot me an annoyed glance as he led us back to where he and Agion had been hiding—a little clearing made larger because it is hard for tall grass and reed to stand up to the weight of a centaur. Already, though, the foliage was righting itself and even growing again, and we stood chest high in the rushes—well, flank high for Agion and waist high for the other two men. Agion cleared the place of reed and vine, swinging the scythe he had recovered where it lay in the road, untouched by satyr hand. It reassured me, somehow, that Brithelm’s account of how and why he was here was familiar, even soothing. My brother was every bit as harebrained as ever.

It seems that Brithelm had wakened from a trance on the morning I left, and found me gone. That much, he admitted, he had expected—that his younger brother would be gone, off on his “knightly calling,” as Brithelm put it so generously. Bayard was generous not to laugh.

“But I also awoke to the unexpected, little brother, more unexpected than you could even imagine or dream. For accustomed as I am to receiving signs and visions, never have I received one so . . . manifest, so tangible as this.”

Brithelm fumbled in the pockets of his robe and brought out the dog whistle.

“It is a dog whistle, Galen,” he explained serenely, “used for . . .”

“For calling dogs. Really, Brithelm, I know what the thing is and how it got there.”

“As do I, my brother, as do I,” Brithelm exclaimed blissfully. “It is a sign from Huma. A sign from Huma that urged me to come to the hermitage.”

Bayard smiled broadly and nodded encouragingly to my poor addled brother.

“For you see,” Brithelm went on serenely, “I had been meditating on whether to return to this hermitage after the bees drove me out.”

I remembered when that happened. My brother was all welts for weeks. Agion nodded in sympathy.

“Did you learn to sleep standing up?” he asked my mystical brother, who smiled and nodded, though I do not see how he could possibly understand what Agion had said to him.

“This whistle is the sign,” Brithelm continued. “I shall call to the animals, to the things of Nature, and they shall answer, shall come to me. Shall commune.”

There was a sound on the path, rising from the center of the swamp and coming slowly in our direction—the sound of reeds rustling, of splashing. I could guess that Brithelm had been bumbling delightedly in our direction for hours, blowing that whistle, alerting the entire swamp to the whereabouts of one fool at least. There was some chance that the oppressive silence we had been traveling through was the whistle’s doing. There was an even greater chance that now, with Brithelm in our midst, we were much more likely to commune with satyrs. Bayard signaled for quiet, so at the moment I had no chance to tell Brithelm that the whistle had come from my pocket instead of from Huma’s Breast, somewhere beyond the stars.

Not that it would have made any difference.

But we were speaking of satyrs. There were four of them crouching on the trail, each clutching a toothed scimitar. I could not imagine a more nasty-looking weapon.

Agion, crouched painfully low for a thing his size, peered through the bushes at the creatures, then turned to Bayard and whispered—much too loudly, I thought—”I think we can take four of them, Sir Bayard, even if the holy man carries no weapon and does not fight.”

“Fighting isn’t the point, Agion,” Bayard hissed. “At least not until we try to make the peace I promised Archala. The point is how to manage this so that the satyrs don’t attack out of sheer preference when they see us, so that we don’t have to fight them to get things calmed down enough to talk.”

“Why don’t you show them your armor, sir?” I whispered, tugging at Bayard’s sleeve. “You can tell them you’re just a knight and leave out the Solamnic part, and maybe they will escort us.”

“That would be just fine except for two things, Galen. One, the armor is probably still galloping through the swamp somewhere, on the back of our pack mare.”

I had forgotten that.

“Two, even if we do not have the armor beside us, I could not advance a lie, which is what you’re suggesting. The armor is Solamnic, forged in Huma’s name. I would dishonor it by resorting to falsehood, for every falsehood discredits the Order.”

“But, Sir Bayard . . .” I began.

“Fighting is not the point at all,” Brithelm interrupted. “Nor is imposture,” he pronounced in a loud and joyous voice. “For you are mistaken. These are innocent creatures, full of trust and altogether harmless.” He stood and walked toward the satyrs, his arms extended.

The rest of us hurried to our feet. Agion and Bayard followed my generous brother, scythe and sword at the ready. I started to follow, reluctantly drawing my own little sword.

It was then I felt it, that icy grip in my blood that held my feet in place, that sucked me down like the quagmires of the swamp will entrap the unwary traveler who steps into them.

Upon my shoulder I felt the prickling of talons. I felt the soft brush of feathers, smelled flesh and loam and the distant scent of decay and heard the voice again, unchanged from the night in the library.

“Follow me, little one,” it whispered. “The first payment of your debt has come due.” The wings fluttered at my ear, the weight on my shoulder was lifted.

All of a sudden, there seemed no choice. As I was bidden, I turned from the trail straight into knee-deep waters that slowed my retreat from the negotiations or impostures behind me, following the fitful path of the raven through the branches ahead of me.

Now there were only false trails and hidden places among the leaves. Those, and mud, and night approaching. And crocodiles, of course.

Now the bird had vanished. Diving through a tangle of broad-leafed plants, it had not emerged, evidently, and search though I might, I was left alone at this juncture. The light in the swamp was all but gone. I sat down upon a cypress tree in yet another large clearing—a clearing that branched into a dozen trails like it was the hub of an enormous wheel. I had no idea how far I had traveled, but I was sure to be out of earshot of my companions.

And within earshot of other things.

I took stock.

Perhaps I should try to go back. Perhaps my companions would believe that I had been protecting them from possible ambush by scouting the rear. At great personal risk, I might add.

Brithelm would buy it. After all, he believed that Huma was in the business of dispensing dog whistles. For my other two companions I could not speak, except to be sure that Agion would be easier to convince than Bayard, since the centaur was slow-witted to begin with.

But Bayard was another matter.

Perhaps I could cut myself. Only slightly, mind you, but enough to exhibit. Then perhaps I could invent a terrible knife fight with a satyr—no, two satyrs, I’d say—bent on circling around us for another ambush. Two small satyrs, since Bayard would be listening. Yes, it just might work.

Unless the satyrs had defeated them. Then I would be walking into the hands of the enemy. That would demand an altogether new set of lies.

Then, of course, there was the raven, which had conveniently dropped out of sight. Was I free to go, even if I could make up my mind? Would I be allowed to escape the summons of the Scorpion?

The cries of birds and reptiles around me seemed more hostile now, and branches and tree limbs leaned even farther over the dozens of paths that ended in nowhere or, even worse, ended in danger. What’s more, I was steering only by moonlight now and could see scarcely ten feet in front of me. I started down one trail, which narrowed into nothing scarcely a dozen yards from the clearing where I had picked it up. The next one I tried ended in a wide pool of bubbling and boiling mud like those we had seen only hours ago when we set off toward the satyr camp.

So I returned to the clearing, seated myself once more on the cypress tree, tried to calm myself and push down my rising voice of panic.

Lost. Lost. Spiralling down into the quicksand. Eaten by crocodiles. Snake bitten and poisoned, crawling down a trail to nowhere.

All of a sudden, the clearing grew quiet. To my left a covey of quail took wing, flying overhead in one of those brief, scrambling flights they make in the face of danger. I followed them with my eyes, watched them settle on the other side of the clearing.

When they were lost to sight, when I turned my eyes and thoughts back to the clearing in which I was sitting, he was only a few strides away.

It took a second more to make him out in the darkness. I was startled anyway. I gasped, fell backwards off the cypress tree, and managed only one word before I hit the ground, before I landed on my back, helpless as a capsized turtle. Before the familiar strong hands began to throttle me.

“Alfric!” I shouted, as he pounced.

Chapter Seven

Alfric’s grip tightened on my throat. He scrambled, trying to get footing on the wet ground, then suddenly was kneeling above me, pinning my arms beneath his knees, grinding them painfully into the mud. For a man whose highest ambition was Solamnic Knighthood, he was awfully skilled at dirty fighting. Struggle as I did against my brother’s strength and weight, the only thing I could raise from the ground was mud. My arms hurt under something edged and metal; Alfric was wearing Father’s armor, of all things. It made you feel as though you were being assaulted by your entire family tree.

“This time we’ll do things right, Weasel,” my brother whispered hatefully. In the dark I couldn’t see what he was about to do, but I was sure that it wouldn’t seem all that right to me.

“None of your talking. None of your wheeling or dealing or bargaining. Not this time. You left me back in the moat house. Left me there so’s you could go parading off in glory around the countryside as a squire—the squire I would of been, had politics and brothers not kept me from it.”

I heard the sound of a knife being drawn from its sheath. Alfric was ready to clean what he had trapped, evidently.

“I beg you, Big Brother, to reconsider what you’re doing here.”

“I’m not listening to you. Remember, I said no talking.”

I felt the edge of a blade at my throat.

“Look, while we are struggling here in this swamp . . .”

“Oh, I don’t see us struggling all that much, Galen. The way I see it, you’re pinned down, waiting for something you can’t escape.”

I could see him grin in the dark.

“You see, little brother, I been watching this swamp ever since I got here. It sure grows quickly, don’t it? Why, it may well be years before anyone finds your bones, and by that time they won’t know who you are. Even if they do, who’s going to suspect me?

“I’ll probably be head Pathwarden by the time your leavings surface up. I’ll own the moat house and all lands pertaining. Nobody rich ever murders.

“I’ll be just as sorry as I can about the remains of my long lost brother who disappeared many years past when he followed Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, trying to become the squire he really didn’t have il in him to become.

“Do you like my story so far, Weasel?”

Hardly. At best, it promised to be a long gloat.

Still, I didn’t want to rush him towards the conclusion he had in mind. So I stayed silent, yielding, but above all listening. Far more than whatever foolishness my brother had to say, I was interested in the sound of someone—anyone—approaching.

I had guessed by now that the man the centaurs had seen following us was not Brithelm, but Alfric. But it no longer made any difference.

After all those years of throttling me, of strangling me until I almost blacked out and he remembered that Father frowned on fratricide, Alfric was out of the moat house, far from the long arm of the old man’s discipline. He seemed prepared to go through with it.

I saw his knife glint in the moonlight.

“Alfric.”

“Shut up, Weasel. I will do whatever I please from this point on. And whatever I please is . . . to become squire to Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard, Knight of Solamnia.”

“Oh, that can be arranged, Brother,” I exclaimed, bargaining frantically for anything that would stop the blade from menacing my throat, listening desperately for any approaching footsteps, any hoof beats, any reason to cry out. “You can take my place polishing his armor at the tournament.”

“Tournament?” The pressure of the knife blade slackened. “What tournament?”

“Indeed. At Castle di Caela, over in southern Solamnia. All the bullies and thugs will be there, vying for the hand of Enid di Caela and the deed to her father’s holdings. It’s a place to make connections, I assure you. In fact, I’ll help arrange your squirehood. I’d be more than delighted to . . .”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, Galen. You see, Sir Bayard’s going to be short a squire when his pet weasel submerges somewhere in this swamp. That makes me an obvious candidate for the vacancy. I won’t need introductions or letters of reference from you. I’ll be all that’s left.

“From there, it’s but a little maneuvering and some tournament folderol and, who knows, in the end perhaps they will consider me for the hand of this Lady Enid di Caela. I can sit a horse as well as the next man. I can handle a lance.”

“But, Brother,” I improvised, the edge of the blade now tight once again on my gullet, as my brother followed phantasms of glory. “Let’s start with your first obstacle before we make you head di Caela and all. Surely you realize that you’re going to arouse some suspicion, crawling out from under some rock the instant the job of Bayard’s squire is open.”

“So we do it my way. And here is the way I have it figured,” he proclaimed, lifting the knife. I took a deep breath, pretended to listen respectfully as Alfric gleefully, almost rapturously, explained his foolish plan. He paused for a long time. I could almost hear him figuring the angles, hear those rusty wheels turning in the great gap of his head.

“Here it is,” he began tentatively. “I shall tell Bayard that . . . Father . . . found some evidence that you, not me, was the negligent one.”

“And that evidence was?” It was uncomfortable, lying here draped over the heavy arm of my brother. Again a long pause.

“Well?”

“Shut up, Weasel. I’m contriving.

“Something about . . .” he drawled, then shook me with excitement—until my head ached. “Something about your naming ring! That was what sprung you in the first place, Bayard finding it on his mantle, of all the dumb Weasel luck!”

“What about the ring?”

Another long pause, during which the knife withdrew. Then my brother lifted me, setting me down roughly on the cypress tree, and turned me to face him.

“Uh . . . what do you figure, Galen?”

I figured he was mine now.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I began, scrambling for a reasonable story. “How about . . . that Father looked more closely at the rings . . . and discovered that the man in black had the real naming ring, and that the one Bayard found was a forgery, planted to make him do precisely what he did do, which was pass over you and take on your ‘wronged’ younger brother as a squire. Then Father sent you with the news to Sir Bayard so he could set the whole squire business straight at once.”

Alfric nodded joyously and eagerly. He was the only one stupid enough to believe a story so close to the actual truth.

“You know, I just think Sir Bayard will believe that one,” he said, hopping up and down until he tottered in the heavy armor.

I nodded innocently in agreement.

“Oh, by the way, Galen. The man in black? Well, he’s dead.”

“Dead?” The news gave me a shudder.

“It was the strangest thing, Father says. An hour after you leave, he sends the guards down with food for the culprit and finds him dead. The door is still locked and the bars on the windows was intact—so nobody got in to do him in. He was wrapped in his black cloak, and the smell, the guards said, was just horrible.

“What’s most peculiar about this, Galen, is Father says the body was all decrepit and mummified, as if the prisoner was a good year or more dead.”

“But . . .” Double shudder.

Alfric nodded.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be still in any spot, especially in this raven-infested swamp. I moved toward one of the trails that branched from the clearing—any trail. I was no longer particular. But Alfric stepped in front of me.

“Just where do you think you’re going?” demanded Alfric, gripping his knife threateningly.

“Why, to find Sir Bayard,” I said, as convincingly as I could, “and confess.”

“How’re we going to find Sir Bayard?” he asked suspiciously.

“Follow me. I know where he is,” I lied.

I had not taken two steps when Alfric’s hand came crashing down upon my shoulder, holding me in place.

“Don’t try to go nowhere without me, Weasel,” he muttered ominously. It was back to the old brotherly ties. So we began to walk in a random direction, Alfric’s left hand resting heavily on my shoulder, his right at his belt, on the handle of the sheathed knife. Or at least that’s where I suppose his right hand was. By now, it was really too dark to tell.

We walked slowly, in silence at first, away from Bayard, of course, or so I hoped. Far ahead of us, the swamp was alive with insects, with the bellowing of bull frogs, with the sound of awakening owls. Around us it was constantly quiet, except for occasional splashing or cries of alarm or fluttering of wings—sounds that were always moving away from us. Yet if we were making enough noise to silence or scare off the smaller animals, we were making enough to draw the larger ones.

If a larger animal drew near, it wouldn’t hurt for me to be more quiet—and for Alfric to be louder. All the better to focus the attention of that larger animal.

“How did you do it?” I began, not whispering but keeping my voice low.

“Do what?” my brother asked, his voice like a foghorn in the darkness of the swamp. Something directly ahead of me skittered away in panic, leaving behind it a trail of shrill noises. Good. My brother was loud.

Bring on the carnivores.

“Why, how did you escape, Alfric? It’s no mean trick to slip out of the moat house under Father’s attentions. I’d like to know how you managed it.”

“Only in hour or so after you left,” Alfric began his story serenely, his large hand digging uncomfortably into my shoulder, “I take stock of the situation and realize that it is time to call in a few debts owed me. For you see, little brother, you are not the only one who has debts to collect.”

He laughed, laughed with what the old stories call a rising hysterical laughter. Believe me, it is as disturbing as it sounds, especially when you are alone in a swamp with someone who is doing it. Again I was sure I was about to be portioned. I kept walking, carefully testing the ground in front of me. Then Alfric’s laughter faded, as suddenly and as disturbingly as it began. He said nothing more for a while. We walked farther, the only sounds around us the shrill winding noise of the crickets, which grew slower and slower as the damp night air grew colder.

“It was scarcely an hour after you left that I just walked over the drawbridge and out across the grounds. You see, Father was feeling a mite sorry for me on account of losing my squirehood and all, so he wasn’t as watchful as he usually is. So I was off after you almost before you was out of sight, following the tracks of the horses until I noticed them tracks was crossed by the tracks of others . . .”

“Centaurs,” I interrupted, and received a box on my ears for the information.

“I know that, Weasel! How come you think I stayed so far behind you when old Molasses dropped over? I could of caught up then, but I wanted to catch you alone and I couldn’t be sure what was going to happen.

“So when they took you off to that clearing and judged you I was not that far behind, and when you was ambushed and my saintly middle brother came through to save the day and complicate things, I was where I could see that, too.

“Oh, yes, I been watching all along,” he said ominously, and pushed me from behind. But at the moment I wasn’t moving.

“Alfric, there is something in front of us that might be dangerous.”

I stopped completely. Alfric did not. The heavy breastplate jarred against the back of my head. The metal on the breastplate rang. So did my ears.

“What is it?”

“I hear something moving up there. Something bubbling, the gods help us!”

“Go on, Galen.”

“No, it’s true.”

“I mean, go on!” And he pushed me in the direction of the noise. I paused uncertainly, took one step, then took it back.

My loving brother pushed again. Toward quicksand, lava, a pit of adders—it was all the same to him.

“You heard me. Go on. Don’t worry. I’ll protect you. At least until we find Bayard.”

It was scarcely reassuring, like being one of those legendary sparrows the dwarves take down with them into the mines. When the bird drops dead in its cage, the dwarves know that the air in their tunnel is too thin, too unhealthy, and beat a quick exit.

I stood fast, resisting the push of the armor behind me, until the push of the breastplate was joined by the push of a knife blade.

“Very well, Alfric. I’m moving. I’m going forth into uncertainty and very possibly death. You are responsible for this, of course. For whatever happens to me.”

My brother chuckled in the dark behind me.

“Well, Galen,” he drawled, “I expect I can live with that.”

I expect it was a quagmire—a pool very much like the ones we had passed over and around in the daylight, more dangerous in the darkness simply because you could not see where it began, where it left off. The first step into it was enough to confirm my fears: the bubbling sound, the feel of something sucking and dragging at the bottom of my boots. It was dangerous—could take you under to the ankles, to the waist, take you under entirely, depending on how deep it was.

Quickly I ducked, slipped my shoulder out from under Alfric’s hand, and rushed across the mud, trusting that it was only a larger version of what I had seen before.

So it was. Only larger than I had figured. After a while of running, I felt myself sinking. Frantically I tried to recall what I knew about quagmires.

Do not move. Movement gets you in deeper trouble.

Hold still, completely still, and wait for help.

Help from a dim-witted oaf wearing a hundred pounds of armor?

My legs churned even more quickly. I windmilled my arms, hoping devoutly that I could outrun the present terrain.

Twice I sank to my knees, once to mid-thigh, but each time I managed to scramble out of where I had been mired. All the while Alfric called behind me—his voice not quite clear above the bubbling noises of the pool—shouting names, commands, threats.

It would make for a good story to say that my feet found dry and solid ground just as I was about to give up. But it was long after giving up, I suppose, that I discovered I was no longer sinking—that knee-deep in mud I had found a bottom to the quagmire. My body had kept moving out of reflex, out of sheer panic, even after my spirit had failed completely.

It had failed embarrassingly. By that time I was shouting for help from anyone—Bayard, Agion, Brithelm, the satyrs, the Scorpion, Alfric, and whoever else might be within earshot. I prayed to the gods, then bargained with them, promising to spend the rest of my life in an obscure priesthood, after having surrendered all my possessions to one of the temples of Paladine in Solamnia. My next thoughts had been scarcely as profound, as I peeled the bark from the nearby cedars, with language that would have made stable hands blush. I had tried weeping, blubbering, even rising hysterical laughter.

I am grateful for whatever prayers or promises or cries or curses got me to the other side of the quagmire. For I do not know how I covered the last few yards to safety except that it involved pulling myself out by a long, thin vine that lay atop the pool, a vine I had entangled around my waist, my shoulders and neck, until I had stood a great chance of being hanged by my own lifeline.

Whatever happened, I lay on solid ground at last, wrapped almost completely in leaves like some sort of elf dinner, gasping for air and listening, as the rest of my senses recovered from the strains and the shocks, to the sound of something behind me in the dark—a noise rising above the churning sounds of the pool I had just passed over and through.

The sound of cries for help. Which were pretty familiar by now. But this time they weren’t mine. Alfric’s cries—pitiful, yes, but music to my ears.

“Galen, are you out there? Galen? Help me!”

I sat on the wonderfully dry earth and disentangled the wonderfully strong vine from around my elbow.

“Help me! I know you’re there! Father’s armor is heavy, and I’m going down!”

Quickly, I fashioned the vine into a lasso.

“Galen, for the sake of Paladine and Majere and Mishakal and Branchala . . .”

His voice trailed off. Alfric had always been poor at theology; he had run out of gods, evidently.

“What do you expect me to do?” I shouted out across the quagmire.

“Throw something out on this mud or quicksand or whatever it is, something I can grab onto and pull myself out.”

“Alfric?”

“What, Galen? Hurry up! I’ve stopped sinking for now, but I’m up to my waist in soil!”

“What’s in this for me, Big Brother?”

Silence across the quagmire.

“But, of course,” I continued, “there is brotherly affection, which I so deeply cherish . . .”

“Stop toying with me, you damn Weasel, and cast out a life line!”

“A little more . . . respect out there, Alfric! All right. There’s a vine set to come in your direction. Now, I don’t know if I can throw vegetation that far, or if it’s long enough to reach you, or even if you can see it in the dark, but I’d say that once I cast it out there, your odds will leap from nothing at all to just this side of slim.”

I cast the vine in the direction of the voice.

“Be of good faith, Brother. Things grow quickly in this swamp, as you said yourself. If the vine doesn’t reach you, maybe it will grow in your direction.

“And if that fails, surely you’ve found the bottom of the quagmire. Just stand there until someone comes along.”

I turned, walked off into the darkness, unsure of my direction, but filled with a deep and satisfying sense of poetic justice.

The things Alfric called behind me I should not repeat. I suppose that I deserved the new names he was inventing. After all, I relied on trust—and on trust only—that he’d eventually be able to wade his way out of the fen in which I had left him. If it turned out that he was a little worse off than I had foreseen, that Father’s armor was a little heavier than I had thought . . . well, it calmed me to realize that if the vine and the darkness failed Alfric, if it turned out I deserved worse than simple name calling, my punishment wasn’t likely to arrive soon. At least not by his hands. I walked confidently off into the darkness, away from the sound of Brother’s curses and shouts and, finally, his screams.

Darkness, though, does all kinds of terrible things to confidence. It was the kind of night with* nothing to offer the traveler, the kind you should sleep through or wait out. Around me, Alfric’s shouts and curses faded, to be replaced by other noises less certain, more threatening: the sounds of quick scuffling and quicker movement; of things I could not see splashing and swimming in waters I could not see; the sound of those waters themselves moving; and the occasional, threatening laughter of some marsh bird. I was good and lost. After about an hour, the trail I had been following dwindled into nothing but a snakelike crease through the reeds. I stopped on the rapidly narrowing path, wondered at what kind of creature had made the trail in the first place, and then, faced with no other choice, continued in the same direction, though soon entirely without direction or even the sense that someone or something had been here before me. Remembering a fragment of the advice Father had hurled at me when we left the moat house, I crouched and checked the bole of a cypress tree. Moss grew on all sides. North, it seemed, was everywhere. A snorting sound brought me to my feet, clutching my sword and expecting mayhem. I gripped the trunk of the cypress, eager to get behind it if I could figure out where “behind” was—where the sound had come from in the first place.

A louder snort followed, and a strange stirring that seemed to come from somewhere off to my left and below me. Cautiously I moved to my left, prepared for centaurs or satyrs or the legendary carnivorous birds that were supposed to infest this swamp. Down on my hands and knees I went, crawling toward the source of the noise. But not slowly enough, evidently. I had not crawled ten feet before the ground in front of me gave way under my hands. For a moment I stood over a yawning incline of mud and flattened reed, looking below me into a clearing darker still, where something large and indefinite glistened as it moved. Just when it dawned on me that I did not want to go down there, I had no choice, sliding rapidly face first over the mud and the slick, leafy surface down into a puddled depression.

Where something monstrous splashed and snorted.

I lay still for a moment, having heard the old story that predators will not harm you if they think you’re dead. I hoped devoutly that the predator would think that my fall had killed me.

For a long minute I lay still, hearing nothing but the breathing and slow movement of a large creature. Then I felt warm breathing on my neck, and a wet snuffling that was anything but predatory. It was like a dog or a calf .

. .

Or a horse.

I turned onto my back quickly, and stared into the wide-eyed face of the pack mare.

We had been traveling for some time, wrestling and kicking at one another, as I tried to steer the stubborn pack mare through the dense undergrowth and she, burdened by my weight and that of the armor, struggled to leave one of us behind on the soggy ground of the swamp. I was clinging for dear life when the darkness finally began to break ahead of us. It was nothing like morning, which was still hours away. Nor was the green light in the trees anything like sunlight filtered through leaves and through the needles of evergreens—that fresh color I was to remember fondly in the darker times up the road. Instead, this green was a timid and unhealthy one, fading to a yellow or an off-white I had never seen in nature, unless it was the color of a snake’s belly. The color was that of phosfire. I can tell you that now, though at the time I had never seen the lights in the wilds.

Phosfire was what the elves call “midnight blaze,” the burning gases that rise from the scraps and remains of the dead things a swamp consumes. Phosfire gives off heat only when it has been condensed, when it drips from the tubing of the still (like the one in Gileandos’s library, which of course he seldom used to distill phosfire, but which could be used in any way an enterprising student cared to use it, as his incandescent farewell from the battlements had proven).

As a liquid, phosfire is highly flammable, burning within minutes after contact with air. As a gas, it is only a harmless source of light, not unlike the luminescent powder found in a firefly’s abdomen, though it does become more thick, does look more bright and fevered, the closer you travel to the center of a swamp and the center of all the death it has swallowed through the years.

At the time, I was encouraged by the light, as was the mare, and we both followed it eagerly. I urged my mount on, sure that the light had a source somewhere on drier, safer ground—a dwelling, perhaps, or the campfires of a surviving Bayard, Brithelm, and Agion.

Of course, I did not notice (or refused to notice) that the green light gave off no warmth, moved nervously ahead of me, and illuminated nothing but itself. It was only when the phosfire gave way to firelight, when the green faded into the friendlier glow of reds and of yellows, when the smell of woodsmoke greeted me, and finally the warmth of actual campfires, that I began to recognize that the light which had led me farther and farther into the swamp had been something unpleasant and lifeless.

I dismounted and led the mare into concealment behind a small cluster of laryx bushes. I surveyed. Below me now, probably at the lowest point of the swamp, lay a small rise, as though having bottomed out, the swamp intended to take heart and return to sea level. Lowlands these were indeed, but surprisingly dry from the looks of it; dry enough to support what appeared to be a circle of smudges, small campfires designed to provide light and warmth and also drive away the last insects of the season. Piles of unlit kindling lay strewn from one fire to the next, completing the sense that whatever lay within the band of flames was protected and encircled.

But within that circle of fires stood only a rickety cabin on stilts, its near wall nursing a large hole near the back corner, its roof nearly ruinous, smoke rising through its many holes. Indeed, at first I assumed the cabin was on fire. Such was not the case; perhaps the chimney suffered from a damaged flue. Whoever lived there was most unfortunate, dwelling in misery beneath the constant layers of smoke.

About the house I saw a herd of goats—at most a dozen, including the kids—trotting about within that circle of fire and wood, as though somehow the fire contained them, kept them from wandering off. It looked as though the goats were right at home in those ramshackle surroundings. They were a long-haired breed, the kind you would expect in the highlands or the mountains, but here in the marshes their long hair was streaked and clotted with mud, with vines and lichen dripping from their beards and horns. They were almost frightening to look at.

There was fire nearby, and a promised warmth. The pack mare snorted with yearning. My boots were soaked through, my trousers muddy and wet well above the knees, and despite the cold discomfort I felt, the insects still seemed to relish me.

I stepped out from the undergrowth behind which I had been hiding, and moved down into the small bowl of the swamp toward the cabin, the fires, the goats, the whole show of lights, leading the mare behind me. When I approached, the goats were as goatlike as I expected, watching me with those drowsy, stupid eyes and slowly chewing whatever nameless greenery they had grazed in the clearing. The smell was pretty much as I had figured, too, so I approached more rapidly, eager to get the strong woodsmoke between me and the only apparent residents. The pack mare snorted once and pulled back strongly against the reins, but I made a soothing sound with my tongue and led her on.

Once we stepped within the circle of fires I realized my mistake.

Suddenly the flames began to move and waver like phosfire. I turned, intent on beating a quick exit, but it was too late.

Now the kindling stood on end, began to grow and expand at a speed that was grotesque even for this swamp. Within seconds I was surrounded by a high palisade fence—a fence containing no opening, no exit I could see. Now the goats were changing, too, their long hair growing back into their bodies as quickly as the palisades had grown from the ground. They rose to their hind legs, adopting human form—or at least a form approaching human. The changed creatures—no longer goats, but satyrs—eyed me sleepily, stupidly, as if they were waking up. They walked to the fires, drew burning branches from the midst, and held them aloft like torches. Slowly and menacingly, they encircled me.

My first idea was to drop the reins, leave the mare to her own devices, and scramble into that small, smoky cabin in the center of the clearing. There, above the pack of satyrs and the confusion, I would have time to think, to invent, to patch together an escape.

But I was losing the chance to act. For while the fences and goats had risen, the cabin had changed, too, rising and reassembling in that sickly green light until it was no longer a cabin at all, but an enormous and hideous throne, standing on stilts in the midst of a fortified stronghold.

Seated upon that throne was the Scorpion.

I must admit that the whole arrangement was pretty impressive. The throne was skeletal: thin and intricate and a nasty off-white color from base to crown. Over its surface, black on a background of bone and ivory, hundreds of scorpions danced, rose, or lifted their poisonous tails.

He sat on the throne, lean and menacing. Beneath that heavy black hood, he might have been anyone. But there was, I am certain, only one with that voice.

The same voice I remembered from the moat house—musical and honeyed and laced with ice and metal and poison. The voice of the raven.

For as soon as I recovered my balance and brought my frantically rearing pack animal under control, as soon as I had taken in the entire scene—the throne, the vermin, the man cloaked and hooded in black—then came the voice from the man, confirming my fears.

“Little Galen, your worst nightmare has returned upon you. Oh, yes, you have dreamed this and wakened with a start, or in sweat and with your small heart racing, for in your sleep you behold me and are afraid past all assurance and comfort.”

Actually, he had never been a part of my worst nightmare, which involved a huge faceless ogre wielding a huge and impossibly sharp axe. But he was nightmarish enough, and I was certainly not inclined to argue with him. I gaped and nodded my agreement. My knees began to give.

“I believe, little friend, that a part of your debt has come due?”

“It surely has, Your Grace, and I had every intention of paying it to you. Paying it to you with interest, for you were exceedingly kind to let me out of that prison of a library on such short acquaintance and in such highly unusual circumstances . . .”

He leaned from the throne, stared down on me like a predatory bird stares down upon the rodent of the day.

“But it’s more complicated than that. Of course, as Your Grace is probably well aware, I haven’t been allowed the chance to collect my thoughts, much less any good information regarding Bayard, over the last fortnight, being imprisoned and pressed into service and all.”

The Scorpion sat back and steepled his long white fingers. The circle of satyrs around me narrowed, and with it my options. I began to bargain.

“I have, of course, access to the kind of thing you were bargaining for in the first place,” I began, motioning to the back of the pack mare, where Bayard’s armor lay bundled. “A fine suit of Solamnic armor, scarcely used of late, which if your followers don’t mind a little clean-up detail—scraping off the mud and all . . .”

“Enough.” My host rested his hands quickly, lightly on the arms of the throne, scattering the scorpions.

“And what do you think I want with armor, boy? Do I look like a dealer in breastplates, satisfied by merchandise alone?”

“No, sir. Your Grace looks like my worst nightmare.”

“In that am I satisfied. And I take it that Bayard Brightblade remains somewhere in this swamp?”

“Yes, sir.” Questioning was clearing my head. “That is, as far as I can tell.

“In fact, I’m sure he is somewhere in this swamp, but I am so misplaced, so spun around and squandered by circumstance, that I won’t be able to tell you where east is until morning, much less point out for you where the Knight in question has mired himself.”

I didn’t feel so bad about betraying Bayard. After all, it wasn’t my choice to be here. I couldn’t call Bayard a friend—not really—and was I really his squire, when he had forced me into service? More like his prisoner, and the duty of a prisoner is to escape, isn’t it?

I stopped stroking myself with logic when the man on the throne continued firing questions at me.

“Do you know what a will-o-the-wisp is, boy?” he asked.

“No, sir, but I expect that I soon shall.”

“The floating light in the swamp—marsh gas, fox fire, call it what you will—that is always a step or two ahead of the traveler who follows it. Like the fire that brought you here.”

I nodded in stupid agreement, doing my best to contain the wildly trembling mare I had in tow.

“It is a light that the traveler follows at his peril, for it leads him farther and farther toward the heart of the swamp—wherein perdition lies.”

He chuckled, and the scorpions stirred beneath his hands.

“You, little weasel, are my will-o-the-wisp. For it is your job now to bring your companions here to me, to mire them in the center of this fen and keep them here through long and costly delays. A simple task, but one so worthy of my gratitude.”

“I’d love to help, sir,” I began tentatively, “but for the life of me, I’ve no idea where Sir Bayard is.”

“Don’t play the innocent with me, boy!” he spat, the scorpions rushing away from him, startled by the noise, the anger charging the air. It felt like that time in a storm before lightning begins. I stepped back and watched one of the satyrs—a small one, virtually beardless—turn and leap into the palisade wall, vanishing into the wood. A larger one followed him, and then another.

“Well, I do know that Bayard is somewhere here in the swamp . . .”

“Much better,” he interrupted, “Much more . . . positive and optimistic.” His voice had returned to a calm and honeyed instrument. Slowly the scorpions were gathering once again on the throne.

“You have such little trust in me, Galen. Did you think I would leave you so . . . ill-provided? Have you already forgotten the good turn I did you in the moat house library? No, Galen. What I need is someone to lead Sir Bayard to this very spot.”

One of the satyrs stepped back through the palisade, as easily as if he were walking out of a fog. Paying him no mind, the Scorpion continued.

“For you see, I know where Bayard is.” A globe of light began to glow green in his hand. “And the light that led you to me will lead you to him, will lead the both of you back to this cabin, this encampment.”

“And no harm will come to Bayard?” I asked, puzzled.

“My hand shall not shed blood in this undertaking. My word is always kept, through centuries of fire and flood and wrack. Unlike the word of others.”

“That sounds pretty binding, sir. Given that assurance, I would be glad, by force or by farce, to bring Sir Bayard of Vingaard into your august presence, so that you might draw from him the information you need in whatever way you choose to draw. However, I should like to earn my freedom in the bargain, and a safe escort back to my father’s house. After all, Sir Bayard may not want to trouble himself with my company if my treachery is suspected.”

There was a long pause. The Scorpion deliberated, I awaited his decision, the pack mare tugged less urgently at the reins, and the satyrs did nothing much at all except walk in and out of the fortifications through the palisades.

“I shall allow you that chance,” the Scorpion said finally. “I shall guide you back to your companions, and you, in turn, shall guide them to me. I shall allow you that chance, but I shall be oh so watchful. I shall be a hawk, a nest of owls to your passing, little Weasel, for I am not sure whether your eagerness to betray your comrades is a lie or is the truth.”

At that time, neither was I.

Chapter Eight

That is how, by following we deathly glow of phosfire away from the clearing, I rode the mare back to Bayard’s camp, where the master, the brother, and the means of transportation sat (or in Agion’s case, stood) around a campfire, drinking roka.

Well, they welcomed me back with nothing short of joy—better than I expected or deserved. Bayard and Brithelm were on their feet immediately, Brithelm with his arms spread wide preparing a brotherly enfolding, Bayard more reserved, as befitting his station, but scarcely concealing his delight and relief. Agion was literally prancing like a colt, back and forth between Valorous and the pack mare.

And I would lead these innocents wherever the Scorpion commanded.

I had never liked this hidden arrangement with the hidden enemy. It had begun to bother me that my surveillances were part of a mysterious plan that might well end in outrage to some folk who didn’t deserve it. But call it what you would, it was their skins or mine. Put bluntly and in those terms, it was easy to restrain those higher feelings.

Brithelm was all embraces and questions as he led me to the fireside and set a steaming mug of roka in my hands. I sniffed reluctantly at first, smelled the roka nuts and the cinnamon, then tasted it. To my relief, the roka was of someone’s brewing other than my spiritual brother’s.

I sat back, felt the warm sedative of the drink course through me, and thought of the end of an old fable: And so they took the adder into their midst, and fed and sheltered it, nursing it back to health. Gave it roka to drink, no doubt. The world is not a kind place.

As I drank, I replied to the array of questions arising from my knightly protector.

“But I don’t know where I have been, except through this swamp and in and out of a quagmire or two.

“And I don’t know what I saw for sure, aside from the fact that it was pretty confusing.

“I was passing this way and noticed the light. If I hadn’t seen the light, I probably never would have found you.”

None of the answers were lies. At least not directly.

“No matter how you returned to us, Galen, I thank the gods for that return!” Brithelm exclaimed, embracing me yet again. Agion gamboled about and nodded vigorously in agreement.

Only Bayard stood back from the merrymaking, to the side of the brotherly chat, watching me closely—perhaps even a little distrustfully, though perhaps the distrust I saw in his face arose from my sense of my own misdeeds, from my fear of discovery. I was, after all, the Scorpion’s agent in this matter, and a little bit of a skunk in the bargain, if you stopped to think about it.

Bayard spoke tersely.

“I can’t imagine your being lost, Galen, without marking carefully some of the things you noticed, if only in passing. If you hadn’t gathered, I’m fairly tired of your appearances at times of calm and departures at times of need. I suppose you were ‘on surveillance’ again somewhere safe in the marsh country.”

Bayard then crouched by the fire, warming his hands against the cold that was once more unseasonable.

“I know, sir, that I deserve that bit of mean-spirited viciousness from you, even if it is uncharacteristic of a Solamnic Knight. I know that I have been hiding when I should have been . . . participating more enthusiastically. But it so happens that by accident I did recover your armor, for which I would prefer a little acknowledgement.”

Bayard looked into the fire and nodded reluctantly.

“And what is more, Sir Bayard, in the midst of this path-finding and retrieval, I managed to put in some genuine scouting, of which you should hasten to hear.”

I told him about the encampment at the center of the swamp—the circle of campfires, the house on stilts, the occasional goats in the midst of the place. Of course I left out the Scorpion—not to mention Alfric—shaping my story quickly and naturally, drawing on the instincts I had developed in the moat house. Whatever suspicions Bayard might have, though, were not shared by the others in our party. Agion continued to gambol, Brithelm to rejoice and to talk.

“Goats and houses and fires aside, little brother, what a relief it is to know you are safe, before I retreat into hermitage, before I return to my place of meditation. I suppose I could never have gone back with a light heart had I not known your fate.”

“Brithelm?”

“Yes, little brother?”

But what could I say?

“Do watch yourself as you retreat into hermitage. The swamp has changed from your early days of wildlife communion.”

“Watch myself? Why, Galen, nothing in this swamp poses any real danger. Even the satyrs are not satyrs.”

I glanced quickly at Bayard, who shrugged.

“Well,” I responded, “it has been my experience that quicksand and crocodiles, not to mention satyrs, can bruise the faithful and the gallant as quick as the rest of us.”

“That’s just it, Galen,” Bayard offered from his corner of the fire, never removing his gaze from me as he spoke. “Brithelm doesn’t believe in the satyrs. Says they don’t exist.”

“Wait a minute. Don’t exist?” I was not about to give away what I knew. “Well, you’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

Bayard nodded.

“And you, Agion?”

The centaur stepped back into the firelight, said, “Yes, Galen. Indeed I have. But that is not the point.”

“Not the point?”

The big centaur leaned forward to warm his hands by the fire. A puzzled look spread across his vacant face.

“Not the point,” he explained, “for Brithelm has told us that the satyrs do not exist, whether we see them or no. He is a holy man who is used to things unseen.”

“I understand. Perhaps one of you can tell me what has happened in my absence, then. If something that climbs on Bayard with a knife, that kills two of Agion’s friends, that I have seen with my own eyes doesn’t exist, then I’d like to know . . .”

Theirs was a tale brief and bitter and mysterious. As the story came to light, it resembled more and more one of the legendary gemstones from far-off Kharolis, which is a different color depending upon the angle from which you look at it, or resembling even more closely those old prophetic poems from the Age of Dreams, in which each reader finds his own catastrophes foretold.

Bayard began the telling.

“I looked for you, Galen,” he said calmly, “but found you nowhere.”

“And when we could not find thee,” Agion took up the story at once, “we broke cover and charged onto the road, where we engaged half a dozen satyrs.”

“Four,” corrected Bayard.

“None,” corrected Brithelm.

“None?” I asked, moving closer to the fire.

“Our stories part company almost from the outset,” Bayard explained, moving away from the fire. “I saw four of them, Agion six, and Brithelm saw four goats. The goats come later in my tale.”

Bayard broke off an aeterna branch and stirred the fire with the blue, fragrant stick. He began to speak again.

“Whatever our version, the struggle was over quickly. What struggle there was. Agion claims that two of the satyrs escaped unharmed and headed toward the center of the swamp.”

Toward the stockade, no doubt. It sounded reasonable.

“I, on the other hand, saw only four of them, as I told you,” Bayard claimed. “And all of them put up a fierce fight, wielding clubs, short spears, those swords with the curved blades . . .”

“Scimitars?” I suggested.

“I suppose that’s one name for them, Galen. You should know; you’ve read more of the old stories than I have. Whatever they’re called, the goat-men knew how to use them and it took Agion and me a brief but hard fight to dispatch them. In which your brother had no part. But fighting seems to be a trait that none of you inherited from your brave father.”

He glanced at Brithelm with exasperation. Brithelm smiled back serenely, nodding that he continue his story. Bayard smiled too, despite himself.

“Up until then, I could account for the differences in our stories as arising from the confusion of battle,”

Bayard explained. He leaned back on his heels, smiled dimly. “I recall my first engagement, a brief, nasty skirmish with the men of Neraka near the Throtyl Gap a dozen years back. There were seven of us there, all between the ages of seventeen and twenty.”

He laughed, shook his head.

“There were seven versions of that skirmish, where the enemy ranged in numbers from ten to two hundred. Only a week later did we find that we had outnumbered them.”

He paused, still smiling, then stared at each of us in turn, his gray eyes growing serious.

“But this was not a first battle,” he stated quietly, fixing his stare on the changing light of the fire. “I have lived thirty years and been blooded in clash, in skirmish, in battle, from here to Caergoth. Yet I am puzzled at what came to pass in the aftermath of the fight with the satyrs, when things were calm and when a seasoned man is not apt to illusion.

“For neither Agion nor your brother saw what happened next, as I bent above one of the dead satyrs for a closer look at our enemy. Agion claims that nothing happened next.”

“That nothing changed, Sir Bayard,” the centaur interrupted, folding his arms across his chest. “Nothing, that is, save the look upon thy countenance, which liked to frighten me, thou wert so taken in thy disbelief and horror.”

“Agion,” Bayard explained, “did not see the satyr turn into a goat.” The Knight sat, drew his knife, and ran his finger lightly over the blade.

“It was as if death had unmanned him,” he said finally, staring once more into the fire. “As though the dying had taken all humanness from its body, leaving only goatish, inhuman remains.”

“Which was all there was from the beginning, Sir Bayard,” Brithelm said, patiently but much too loudly for this dangerous terrain. “It has the makings of a proverb,” he added with a smile. “‘If you fight goats, expect to kill goats.’”

“Whichever,” said Bayard, his voice low and oddly troubled. “But of one thing there can be no doubt: things are passing strange in this forsaken swampland. I am anxious to leave, but first, I’ll fulfill my pledge to confront the satyrs, be they real or imagined, and then hasten on the way to my appointment.”

Bayard looked long and hard at the fire before rising. He stomped off to attend to Valorous and the pack mare. Something fluttered in the bushes to my left. I started, thought of ambush. Then I recalled it would not happen here, that it was my job to lead these folk to ruin—back to the house at the center of the swamp, where, if ambush was coming, it would come.

Meanwhile, Agion had busied himself with gathering bundles of reeds and leaves, which he fashioned into a makeshift mattress on the floor of the clearing. As the others set about their business, he caught my eye and motioned toward his handiwork with a big, ungainly hand.

“My lord Archala said seven days and seven nights among us will find thee out,” he observed, his face widening into a smile as kind as it was ugly. “But he never ordered thee to spend all that time in waking.”

I crawled onto the mattress gratefully and, with my enormous companion and captor standing watch, slept heavily through the morning and the afternoon.

I figured that Bayard had lost all patience with Pathwardens for the moment. Even the time I slept was time he had to make up on the road to Castle di Caela.

But there was good in this impatience, for while I was asleep, Sir Bayard seemed to have forgotten about pressing me for further details about my adventures of the night before. Or had let it pass on purpose. As he attended to the horses and Brithelm moved away from the fire to the far edge of the light, where he sat in what seemed to be meditation, I stirred sleepily on my bed of reeds, reached in my,pockets, and drew out the Calantina.

One and ten. Sign of the Adder.

Well, then. Best do what adders do.

I roused myself and walked over to Bayard, who leaned against the pack mare, his big hands on her saddle, intent on tightening what the swamp had loosened. He looked over his shoulder at my approach, then returned to his work.

“Bayard?” Again I called softly. “Bayard?”

He dragged his armor off the pack mare and began to put it on. He looked up at me, smiled, motioned me over. I felt more viperous by the minute.

“I hope you slept well, Galen, but we must be moving. I’m sure we can find the satyrs near that place you spoke of. How far would you say we are from that encampment? Help me with this.”

I stooped, tightened a greave, and answered.

“Not far, I expect, sir. It should be easy to find again.”

“Think, boy,” he urged. “You have no idea how serious this delay is to me.”

As I helped Bayard to his feet the phosfire began to shine above our heads, at first spangling the early evening air as though it had settled, like an army of fireflies, in the branches of a huge, mossy oak that overhung the clearing where we had camped. Shortly, the light arose from the branches and began to move, back in the direction from where I had come.

I pretended not to notice the phosfire at first, but soon I was aware that none of my companions had seen it. So I could follow the weaving light easily, stopping once in a while to pretend at pondering my whereabouts before pretending to recognize a tree, a standing pool of water, a bend in the path. Soon I had to pretend no longer, for my companions followed me unquestioningly, involved as they were with the swatting of midges, the breaking through underbrush, and the swearing at terrain and at each other.

All the while, the light hovered above us and a little ahead of us, my signpost through the treachery of the swamp. And the night dropped upon us with that terrifying quickness it can possess only within deep greenery. At Bayard’s orders I took the lead as the guide. Walking at my side, Brithelm carried one of the torches, and Agion brought up the rear carrying the other. Bayard led Valorous and walked between the lights, now wearing his full suit of armor, which creaked loudly and weighed him down in the soft ground of the swamp. He must have foreseen the possibility of a pitched battle taking place at the spot to which I was leading them, and he wanted to be dressed for the occasion.

What distressed me the most was that Brithelm was coming with us. What the Scorpion had in mind for our little party, I couldn’t guess, but my innocent brother did not deserve my treachery. But he was intent on accompanying us. My brother was along for the duration.

Always, the green, unhealthy phosfire danced a few yards in front of me, guiding us all toward the encampment and who knew what destiny.

When, ahead of us, I smelled woodsmoke and heard the bleat of a goat, I stopped and took stock. I searched my history there at the edge of the encampment, ankle-deep in wet mud. Secretly, quickly, I drew the Calantina from my pocket and cast the red dice in my hand. Sign of the Adder again. I was being told something, but I could not figure it out.

Brithelm laid his hand on my shoulder. I started, then turned to find him staring at me, face filled with worry and concern.

“What ails you, little brother?”

“Ails me? Why, nothing, Brithelm.” I looked behind me cautiously: Bayard was soothing an increasingly skittish Valorous.

Suddenly, the sound of shouts and shrill cries burst from the clearing ahead of us. Bayard drew his sword, grabbed me as I tried to run back up the trail, and cast me to the ground.

“Draw your sword, Galen!” he ordered softly and urgently, his teeth clenched. “By the gods, you’ve enlisted for this one.”

Yanking me to my feet, he carried me bodily under his left arm into the clearing, clutching his sword in his right. I heard Agion snort behind us, heard Brithelm say something and Bayard answer, “Just stay under cover and hold the horses, Brithelm.” Then I was blinded by the strange, artificial daylight of flame and phosfire.

There were twelve of them I could count, and I counted quickly. After their initial outburst, the satyrs regrouped under the cloudy platform—whether it was the house or the Scorpion’s throne hidden by the image of the house I could not tell. The goat-men moved in and out of the shadows, their cries and calls mingling one with another into a low but threatening murmur. Most of them had bows, some of them short, wicked-looking spears.

“I shall take the eight on the left, Sir Bayard,” Agion shouted. “Thou and thy squire may have the four on the right.” And he charged.

It was the kind of division of labor I liked. Now I could only hope Bayard was planning on taking the other four all by himself.

I hoped so even more devoutly when the clouds above the satyrs began to clear. For above them sat the Scorpion on his throne. As the satyrs nocked bows, set themselves to hurl spears, their leader reached into the folds of his black cape and drew out something shiny, something flickering. It was a pendant of sorts, from this distance as clear and as shining as a crystal, which he dangled casually from his left hand, swinging it softly through the air.

While his troops prepared for battle, the commander’s total attention was not on the conflict unfolding, but upon the bauble in his hand. For why shouldn’t he sit there, playing casually with glittering trinkets? His satyrs outnumbered us three to one—six to one if you counted the fighting worth of the Pathwardens—and it was obvious that . . .

“Don’t look at the pendulum,” Brithelm urged beside me, having left Valorous and the pack mare to their own devices and joined us in the clearing.

“See to the horses, blast you!” Bayard cried, and I forgot the warning, the pendulum, and the Scorpion himself, as the volley of arrows and spears was upon us.

I was still lying under Bayard’s feet when a big satyr drew his bow and sent an arrow flying in my direction. I could see the yellow of the feathers on the fletching, but I could do nothing but try to scramble to my feet. But just before the arrow struck, as it certainly would have struck, as I was growing rapidly to believe it would strike, Bayard’s large, well-armored sword arm moved into its path and deflected it into the ground in front of us.

Beside me, I heard Agion grunt, and a quick glance told me he carried a satyr’s spear in the fleshy part of his arm. All of a sudden I feared for his largeness, which had seemed only an advantage before. Now, under fire, he was just a big, stupid target.

The biggest, but not the most stupid. Or so it seemed as Brithelm suddenly burst past us and headed at a trot for the throne and the satyrs. Arrows sailed around him, the closest tearing through his cloak on their way to lodge harmlessly in the ground. Bayard dropped me and started for my brother, but it was too late—Brithelm was well past him, nor was there any question of pursuit, since Bayard was having trouble staying on his feet under the weight of all that armor.

“If it’s not one Pathwarden it’s another!” he sputtered, then sank to his knees, watching along with the rest of us as my brother rushed cheerfully towards the Scorpion.

The lines of the satyrs parted weirdly in front of my brother, as though the nasty-looking armed creatures were reeds in the swamp he was pushing aside in search of a trail. Some of them not only moved, but vanished entirely at Brithelm’s approach. Beside him, where satyrs had once bristled with menace and weapons, several goats grazed calmly, scarcely noticing any of us.

That was enough for Bayard. All of a sudden, he moved lightly, gracefully. He looked back at me, where I was sprawled in the swamp mud, beginning again to dig for cover, and spoke quietly but assuredly.

“Get up at once, Galen, and follow your brother. The army we stand against is peopled with illusion. There is nothing dangerous in this clearing. Do you understand? Nothing dangerous in this clearing.”

The evidence was against him, I figured. But he gazed at me so unflinchingly, so sternly, that I feared going against his will far more than I feared any satyr.

What was more, illusory or not, the satyrs were having a rough time with my comrades. Agion grabbed two of them by their wooly napes and battered their heads together, as though he were playing hairy horned cymbals. The swamp resounded with a hollow, cracking sound, and the satyrs fell unconscious. Laughing, the centaur rushed at two more of them, who stood cowering beneath the Scorpion’s throne.

With his sword drawn, Bayard walked calmly through the midst of the satyrs toward the platform where the Scorpion was seated. The satyrs encircled him, shrieking and hopping like carrion birds around something that is dying, but none of them got near him. One lunged at him with a sinister-looking long knife, but Bayard parried the weapon, sent it skittering across the floor of the clearing, kicked the satyr aside, and kept walking. Indeed, mere looks from Bayard seemed to stop the rest of their attacks, as the satyrs snarled, brayed, and sidled away from him.

It was something out of a story.

I scrambled to my feet and ran after my brother, who was standing beneath the base of the platform. Satyrs had begun to surround him.

I looked toward Agion, who was occupied, juggling two more satyrs, and then to Bayard, who was still yards away from my brother. Neither of them would reach Brithelm in time. I started to call out, with no earthly idea what good that would do, except that it was something to do, and then stopped, gaping in my tracks. For Brithelm had raised his arms and was now rising slowly through the air, borne on the wind, perhaps, except there was no rustle of leaves, no movement of branches. He rose head and shoulders, then waist and ankles above the milling satyrs, whose weapons slashed harmlessly about him.

His hands glowed with a silver light that seemed to cleanse the green and sickly light of the phosfire until the clearing glowed with a fresh white glow like that from a marvelous candle.

With rising courage and confidence I rushed through the midst of the enemy, calling for Brithelm over the sound of their shrieking, which was changing slowly to the bleating of goats. The satyrs turned to face me, but did nothing, and I passed among them easily and without harm.

I rushed to one of the posts that held up the platform and scrambled up it like a squirrel, until I stood on the rickety platform, puffing, sweating, and shouting in triumph.

That was when the Scorpion rose from his throne.

The dark hood still covered his face, but there was something about the bend of his shoulders, of his knees, that signaled defeat. It was a gesture someone would make in a bad painting.

But as Brithelm rose onto the platform, the Scorpion stood to his full height, threw back his shoulders, and stared into our faces.

His eyes whirled red, then yellow, then white, then blue, like the burning of a thousand suns. He turned the shimmering crystal towards us in the shifting swamplight.

It flashed green and yellow and green. For a moment Brithelm lost his balance, plummeted into the empty air, then caught himself on the side of the platform. I staggered backward toward the edge, toward the long drop onto the floor of the clearing. In that moment the battle had turned. We were both defeated. But not Bayard. As anyone could see in his gait, in the straight and dauntless arch of his back as he leaped for the base of the platform, armor and all, and grabbed it firmly and easily, pulling himself up onto the platform in one incredible movement. The Scorpion turned to face him, with only one satyr, although a big one, between the Knight and the sinister caped figure.

The satyr lunged at Bayard, and his spear passed through the Knight, who kept walking as though nothing had happened, straight through the wavering, translucent body of his adversary, as though the satyr were made of smoke or steam. The creature evaporated and in its stead a goat, looking confused and a little embarrassed, clattered into the smoke-filled cabin behind us.

Now Bayard stood beside the cowering Scorpion. He raised his sword, holding it in both hands like an executioner or a woodsman, and brought it crashing down.

Brought it down through hood, through cloak, through tunic, and into the rotten wood of the platform. And through nothing else.

For there were only three of us on the platform, not counting the goat. Bayard and I stood around a dark robe spread like a pool over the platform, over a dark tunic and a pair of shiny black boots. We stood at the front of a ramshackle cabin I remembered from earlier that night, and behind the cabin the swamp was beginning to redden and glow—not with the fires that earlier encircled this place, but with genuine and entirely welcome sunlight. Brithelm pulled himself painfully up from the edge of the platform where he had been clinging. Below us, Agion rubbed his shoulder quietly, gaping amidst a herd of goats. His wound had closed as the sunlight first touched the clearing. When I saw that, I was gaping, too.

“That, I suppose, is that?” the centaur called up to us, gently nudging away a spotted kid that came up to nuzzle his leg.

I glanced at Brithelm, who rubbed his head quietly, staring up at the cabin with admiration and wonder. He was silent, was lost in the strange thoughts of the blessed.

So I looked again at Bayard, who stood astraddle the heap of abandoned clothing, looking back at me.

“What do you think, sir? Is that, that?”

“No, Galen,” Sir Bayard replied, sheathing his sword and casting a puzzled look off into the swamp.

“Though I understand little else of what has just transpired, I can tell you this much. That is anything but that.”