Weasel's Luck

Chapter Nine

“No matter what you say, little brother, this is the kind of place I have sought and awaited. The kind of place I have dreamed of, continually and in humility, I hope. I have prayed to the gods for such a place, in which to take hermitage, alone with thoughts and meditations and with the gentle creatures of the marshes.”

So I kept hearing from Brithelm, who had found meaning and purpose in the struggle we had waged in the swamp, there in the very clearing where we still sat by midmorning, pondering several of many imponderables. Bayard, too, was tired of listening to Brithelm’s praise of “the gentle creatures of the marshes,” especially since some of those gentle creatures—namely the satyrs—had been looking to waylay us since we arrived in the swamp.

“My dreams take me to other places, Brithelm,” he said. “And I for one would arise and travel to Castle di Caela in quest of the hand of the Lady Enid, were it not for the restraining commands of our centaur companion.” Bayard nodded curtly at Agion.

This had been going on for hours: a running argument between Sir Bayard and Agion as to whether obligations had been met, so to speak. Bayard claimed that the swamp was now free of satyrs and whatever evil had led them against the centaurs in the first place. He claimed that since there was no longer any enemy to fight, our job in these parts was done. And since we had cleared our names in this issue beyond any doubt, the centaurs should allow us to go on our way.

Agion, on the other hand, would have been much more comfortable if he could carry back to his centaur friends some satyrs’ heads on pikes. According to him, a grisly trophy was better than peace or than any number of strong promises. And there would be no trophies nor peace offerings from mysteriously vanished satyrs. I could understand Agion’s point of view, and by this time I rather liked the big, stupid thing. But as long as he held out for evidence, we were stuck in the swamp—there were no satyr heads for the having simply because there were no satyrs any longer, if there ever were any to begin with.

Bayard, on the other hand, had not given up the tournament at Castle di Caela. He still had designs on being there in time to enter the lists in the match for the hand of Enid di Caela, for whose unseen smile or unseen approving glance our hero would gladly batter senseless all the unmarried men of Ansalon. That was still eleven days away, he said, and if we left at once we could be in Castle di Caela in plenty of time, and exhaust neither Valorous nor ourselves all that much. All this providing we left at once.

Leaving at once sounded pretty good to me, too. This was a miserable place, and I had not forgotten the other elder brother, no doubt entombed in my father’s armor somewhere nearby, who could be more than embarrassing for me if, dead or alive, he somehow came unswamped.

“Agion,” Bayard argued, “we have stood by one another, have fought side by side. If we were to go over the events of last night, I am sure each of us could find a moment, an occasion upon which he might argue that he saved the other’s life. Given that closeness, the bond of trust that has arisen between us, could you still keep me from leaving?”

“Yes.”

I had to step in. Things were going absolutely nowhere.

“Look, Agion,” I began, leaning heavily against the wall of the cabin, then becoming aware of what I was doing and backing off gingerly in mistrust of rot and of bad architecture. “Look, Agion, what is it that keeps you from letting us simply walk out of here, when we’ve shown you our innocence through our actions? Or do you still think we were the ones who stirred up the satyrs?”

“Oh, thou art truly the most noble of souls, Master Bayard and Master Galen!” Agion exclaimed. “This I cannot—indeed, would not—deny. But by similar token, Archala and my elders are—well, they are Archala and my elders. It is to them that I owe my allegiance, my promises.”

“Just what was your promise, Agion?”

The big centaur frowned at my question and scratched his head in a gesture that reminded me, disturbingly, of Alfric.

“As I recall, Master Galen, ’twas in these words exact. That I should ‘Never let either—the Knight or his squire—stray from your sight until you have returned them to the custody of the elders.’”

Perfect.

“So you promised simply not to let us from your sight until you returned us?” I called down at the centaur, who had wandered away from the platform to a nearby vallenwood, from which he was stripping leaves.

“Yes, Master Galen,” he called in reply, stuffing a handful of vallenwood leaves into his mouth.

“Then come with us.”

Agion swallowed. “Come with thee?”

“Come with us?” Bayard clanked to a stop upon the platform.

“Why not? You’ve heard of leaving the letter intact, haven’t you, Agion?”

“Yes,” he said hesitantly.

“For you see,” I continued, “if you come with us, Agion, you haven’t broken your promise. There may well come a time—no, there will come a time, without a doubt—when our innocence is clear, even to the most mistrustful of judges. But until that time, we have business. Which includes a tournament in eleven days’ time, at which,” I nodded masterfully at Bayard, “our presence is expected.”

It left Agion struggling for purchase. He folded his arms and, lost in meditation, pawed the wet ground of the clearing with his right foreleg. His was a dilemma I could only imagine, and my heart went out to him in his denseness and good intentions.

Agion bought my argument. He nodded his head vigorously, his dumb face breaking into a dumb grin. He kicked suddenly, startling several of the nearby goats.

“I see, Master Galen! If I do not return to the elders without thee, I have not broken my promise! So my best choice is to go with thee!”

Castle di Caela was still some way from us. We would travel south by southeast, cross the Vingaard mountains at a path Bayard remembered, then continue over the southwest shank of the Plains of Solamnia, fording the southernmost branch of the Vingaard River and stopping midway between the ford and Solanthus. It was a week’s journey as the crow flies.

Unfortunately, none of us were crows, and we would be hard pressed to make up for the time we had lost while mired among centaurs and satyrs and Scorpions. Ten days, Bayard figured it, and that was with good weather and no distractions.

Astride Valorous, dressed only in a cloak and a muddy tunic for the long road, Bayard led us free of the marshes. Riding uphill into clearer and drier ground, we reached what I thought was a little knoll, but turned out to be a leveling off of land, a rolling countryside stretching east eventlessly except for a patch of woods here and there and except for the road upon which we were riding, still muddy from yesterday’s bout with rain. It was a pretty landscape, but dull.

Looking back upon the swamplands we had just left, I preferred what lay ahead to the tangled and entangling mystery behind us. I had never seen the countryside before me—never been this far from home. Looking back I noticed that the swamp was changing, but not with the rapid growth that had been a source of wonder and irritation during our stay in its midst. For now the swamp was browning, graying at its edges. I knew it had something to do with the Scorpion’s disappearance, but I also felt as though our leaving was bringing autumn to the country.

Nor was the swamp all we were leaving. I thought of Brithelm standing on the platform, waving goodbye to us as we left the bare central clearing of the swamp. He had decided to stay in his hermitage—there among goats and mosquitoes—to settle in and think upon the grandeur of the gods.

I wished Brithelm no harm, though I was mightily glad to be rid of him. He was foolish and exasperating, but probably the pure best of a sorry bunch of Pathwardens, myself included. The problem was that the world couldn’t take a pure best. Both my brothers were better off swamped, and in the way fate had swamped them. Still, I recalled the farewells, as my visionary middle brother stood dangerously near the edge of the swampy platform, surrounded by goats, watching the three of us ride away.

“Don’t look at things directly, little brother, for insight dwells in the corner of the eye,” he shouted, a last piece of advice for the road.

“What does that mean, holy man?” Agion called back, but Brithelm had turned his back on us and entered that ruinous cabin.

At my last view of Brithelm, before he stepped through the ramshackle door into shadow, he had drawn something silver from his pocket and placed it to his lips.

Huma’s dog whistle.

From the surrounding greenery, goats converged on the shack.

I turned, sentimental and a little sad, on Agion’s back toward the front of my journeys—the east, the future.

“That’s better, Galen,” Bayard said, and I had no idea what an earbending lay ahead of me. “It’s better to look ahead of you than behind you, for behind you are quagmires and quicksand that may swallow your very best intentions.”

What was this? Did he know about Alfric? I kept quiet, prayed silently that the honor he so treasured would keep him from guessing—or even believing—that I had bogged my wretch of a brother. But no, it was a little philosophy to begin his long and intricate story, filled with usurpers and violence and going without and man’s inhumanity to man. There were times that it bordered on interesting, and times that I wished I had Agion’s talent for shutting things out entirely.

This is how it went.

“The third chapter of the Book of Vinas Solamnus, the great text found in its entirety only in the Library of Palanthas, concerns itself with the fortunes of the di Caela family—a history from the time they came mysteriously from the North, through the gates of Paladine, from the time that the founder of the line, old Gerald di Caela, joined with Vinas Solamnus, adding his name to the earliest and proudest list of Knighthood.”

Along with the Brightblades, who were also early and proud upon that list.

To which the Pathwardens were latecomers, I knew. Bayard was far too polite to mention that fact, but we had been instructed early and well as to how our not being one of the dozen or so Old Families would influence our lives.

“So the family thrived in honor and in prominence for a thousand years and more, until some four hundred years ago the title—the di Caela, if you will, the paterfamilias—fell to a Gabriel di Caela. It seems that old Gabriel had three sons. The eldest was named Duncan, if my memory serves, and the youngest son was a Gabriel also. But it is Benedict di Caela, the middle son, who stands at the center of this dark and troubling story—by accident of birth disinherited.”

Agion leaned forward as he walked, rubbing his knotty hands together and smiling. “In most of the old tales,” he offered, “there is a peculiar blessing that comes to the middle son. He stands to inherit little, and ends up with the best inheritance of all.”

“But what we are hearing is history, Agion,” I interrupted, “in which the middle son is most likely the passed over, the dumped upon, unless something untimely happens to the Duncan in Sir Bayard’s story. What is more, it’s usually the youngest who is most blessed in the stories, least blessed in the actual workaday world.”

Bayard sat back in the saddle and raised his hood against the cool wind of the afternoon. “Both of you are wrong,” he stated flatly. “Perhaps you should listen more carefully,” he added, “instead of setting forth your harebrained theories of justice.

“The story of this Benedict,” he resumed, shifting the reins casually from one hand to the other, “began in envy and, as far as I can tell, ends there. He kept at remove from his brothers, there in old Gabriel’s castle—the Castle di Caela, it came to be called, for obvious reasons.

“There young Benedict plotted, ‘mixing poison in his thoughts, dreaming of accidents,’ as the old Book of Vinas Solamnus has it. But accidents can be traced, and in those times the clerics of Mishakal had ways of stopping, of entirely reversing the spread of poison. Even if they were too late, if the poisoned wretch lay dead and past their powers of reversal and healing, they could still trace a poison in the bloodstream, determine its ingredients, when it was administered, and who had mixed it.

“When that failed, they could make the dead talk, uncover the murderer. So for years young Benedict mixed the poison only in dreams, for he was far too timid to murder outright. Instead, he sat alone and brooded, and he thought vengeful thoughts.

“The greatest poison, of course, is that of envy,” Bayard pronounced, and stared pointedly at me, demanding some sort of response.

“Well, sir, I should put hemlock above envy in your poisons, for I have seen envious men live for years. But I am no apothecary. I have no talent for chemistry.”

“Or for metaphor,” Bayard retorted, and picked up the story once more.

“So in a sense—a metaphorical sense—Benedict poisoned himself there in the castle as his thoughts wandered. And when someone is so envenomed, poisoned in thought and in deed, his every discovery is poisoned as well. His every touch is poison.”

“Like the Scorpion?” I asked, and instantly wished I could take back those words. For I had given my nemesis a name in that moment, had revealed I knew more of the man in black who haunted the moat house and the swamp—knew more than an honest boy should know. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and waited for trouble.

But I heard Agion add, “Or like the viper,” and looking up, saw Bayard nod in agreement.

“Or like the poisonous creatures of legend and of history, Agion. Yes, you might say Benedict was one of those creatures, in a sense.

“For the poison had grown inside him until even the things he found, which might have been used to the benefit of all around him—might indeed have won him an inheritance passing that of his brothers—he turned instead to things monstrous and wicked. As he did with the pendulum.”

Pendulum? There was something about . . .

“Found it he did,” Bayard explained, “in the cellar of the very Castle di Caela he coveted, while he fumbled through the darkness searching for a place to practice at the illusions he was learning, fanciful and increasingly insane. He clutched the pendulum to himself, thinking nothing of it for a while. That is, until he brought it out into the light, taking it to his quarters in the upper chambers of the castle. There, drawing it from the folds of his robe, he saw it for the first time.

“Gold was its chain, and the ornament upon that chain was crystal.”

Was crystal. Bayard’s words struck me like the light of a hundred stars in the darkness. I remembered the swamp, the clearing, the goats, the scattered fires . . .

“And dangling that pendulum in front of his eyes, Benedict thought his poisonous thoughts, dreamed his dreams of accidents. As he looked through the crystal, a spider in the corner of his chamber grew to unnatural size, took on unnatural shape . . .”

Like the goats who changed suddenly, unnaturally, into satyrs.

“And would have crawled from the web of its own devising and poisoned him for sure . . . had he not looked once more and seen the creature for what it was all along—the simple spider he had watched in the room’s corner those two days past.”

Bayard paused and looked up at Agion.

“This tale of the spider explains the Curse of di Caela—or at least gives it birth in the histories we know.”

I was taken aback.

Surely not. Surely this old chestnut from the Book of Vinas Solamnus had nothing to do with what I had witnessed two nights back in a clearing in a swamp. Surely books had nothing . . . But Bayard was taking up the story again.

“Benedict knew, then, from this accident of vision, that the pendulum was a piece of power. But from whence had it come? Historians disagree.

“Some claim it had been dropped by a kender, who had found it the gods knew where and in what residence, for there were kender then even as there are kender now. Some claim the pendulum had become dislodged, by accident or by some large and evil design, from the cornerstone of the castle, where it had lain imbedded for generations, awaiting one so envious, so devious, as to use it in the ways that its use was intended. But of course, there are many such legends on the face of Krynn.

“Does it really matter? For the results were the same, whether Benedict acted on an evil that was born within himself by his own discontent and envy, his own early and dark studies, or whether he acted as the instrument of a larger evil that was reaching its hand into the fabric of the world.

“Smaller evil or larger, rest assured that the rats in the cellar adopted new and monstrous forms as Benedict dangled the gold and crystal pendulum in front of his eyes. Legend has it that they sought out Duncan’s room as Benedict instructed, and that when old Gabriel heard the cries of his eldest son and rushed into those chambers intending to rescue the boy, he opened the door onto a scene most unspeakable, which the histories shrink from recording because of its horror.

“Yet the same historians affirm that Duncan’s body was neither bruised nor scarred, that it lay serene, so unmarred by death that the embalmers paused in their grotesque, unhappy task, fearing coma, catatonia, or the mystic’s sleep. But dead he was, and the clerics of Mishakal could find no wounds upon him, no poison within him.

Like the centaurs in Agion’s story.

“Gabriel the Younger, however, smelled a rat, you might say.” Bayard smiled, raised his gloved hand. “He had been hunting at the foot of the Garnet Mountains on the night Benedict discovered the pendulum—on the night henceforth known in Solanthus and surrounding parts of Solamnia as the Night of the Rats.

“Though the clerics found nothing in Duncan’s chambers that suggested foul play, Gabriel the Younger knew that foul play it was, and sent word to his father that the clerics of Mishakal should make Duncan speak from beyond the darkness.

“Old Gabriel recoiled at first, as any father would. For there was something of violation, of a fierce and unnatural disturbance in this practice, even when it lay in the hands of the white-robed clerics with their holiest of intentions. But his youngest son urged him most passionately, saying, ‘Far more unnatural it is, Father, that brother should arise and murder brother for his inheritance and holdings.’ Old Gabriel was inclined to agree, ordering the clerics to grant speech unto Duncan that night in the sepulchre.

“Meanwhile, Gabriel the Younger hid in the mountains.

“His one surviving brother was there, at Castle di Caela, awaiting the ceremonies on the night of the equinox when the priests assembled. Whether his guilt was that of the murderer, or of a more subtle guilt that none could name, none could say. Nor will we ever know for sure.

“Whatever the case, the fire that broke out in the sepulchre the night before the sounding was a fierce one, and was set by hand. The robes found in Benedict’s quarters had suffered burns at the hems, and smelled darkly of lamp oil and phosfire and ash.

“The body, needless to say, was ashes also, and beyond recall. Old Gabriel was now beside himself, sure that the middle son had plotted outrage. So on the night of the equinox, in the chapel of Castle di Caela, in the presence of sixty Solamnic Knights and twenty clerics of Mishakal, the funeral chants arose for Duncan di Caela. But the chants arose for Benedict di Caela, too.”

“I don’t understand,” Agion interrupted. “Was Benedict dead?” The centaur scratched his head in puzzlement.

“Upon that night, Benedict’s father pronounced him dead over strong protest of Knights and clergy, naming Gabriel the Younger sole surviving heir to Castle di Caela. All of this without ever a shred of proof as to the guilt of Benedict di Caela.

“Who, it must be admitted, did not conduct himself in the days that followed as though he were innocent. Benedict fled the castle to raise an army in the lands north of Solanthus—an army of thieves, of goblins, and of the very bounty hunters sent out for goblin heads by the Kingpriest of Istar. It was a disreputable crew, to be sure, and one that set about to tax, extort, and do Benedict’s bidding in the southwest provinces of Solamnia.”

“Did anyone support Benedict when he raised the army?” Agion asked, his face just a little obscured by the waning light and the onset of evening. “I mean, any of the Knights and priests?”

“Most of the priests—not every priest, mind you, but certainly most—saw through Benedict’s illusions to the rats and spiders that peopled them, and what was more, saw that it was Benedict who was shaping those illusions. But there were many Knights who, seeing the legions he could muster, saw power for themselves as well, or what was even worse, feared dangers they dared not brave.

“His ranks, I am ashamed to say, were not free of our own. Solamnic Knights rode at the head of his columns in defiance of their most profound oaths.”

Bayard paused in the telling, stood up in the stirrups and looked about him, then flicked the reins lightly on Valorous’s neck as we began to ascend into a region where the once-thick grass grew patchy and thin.

“So this family you seek to join is descended . . .” Agion began to say, after a brief silence.

“From Gabriel di Caela the Younger, of course. He deposed the brother who had deposed him. He destroyed the usurper, though not utterly. For north and west went Benedict, toward the Throtyl Gap and toward Estwilde beyond it—that very Estwilde from which your foolish dice game comes, squire.”

I nodded in agreement, passing by our old argument to hear the end of Bayard’s story.

“It was there that the Gabriels caught up with him—Gabriel di Caela the Younger at the head of thirty Knights and two hundred foot soldiers, and his father at the head of a force almost twice that size. When the two joined, there was no hope for Benedict.

“Outnumbered, misguided, Benedict tossed illusion after illusion, some of which worked at great cost: thirty foot soldiers died crossing a bridge through the Throtyl Gap when it turned out that the bridge was not there, had never been there. Thirty more were stung to death by scorpions in their sleep.”

I sat back on Agion, breathed deeply and rapidly until the big centaur reached back and steadied me.

“What ails you, young master?” Agion asked, his big, stupid face narrowing with concern.

“Altitude, Agion. I’m not good with heights. But we’re interrupting Bayard. Go on, sir.”

Bayard frowned at me and continued.

“But all of these illusions were as naught when the battle was joined—when Gabriel di Caela the Younger waded through a barrier of renegade Knights, of goblins and goblin hunters and thieves and mercenaries until he stood facing his brother. In that moment, both of them no doubt knew that hundreds of years were hinging upon what happened next.

“Still, there was no choice, as there seldom is in the heat of battle. Gabriel the Younger raised his sword and slashed at his brother with a quickness and an accuracy born in the training of the Order. Those who were present said that the world seemed silent as Benedict di Caela’s head tottered a moment, severed above his shoulders, as the face went entirely pale and the eyelids closed. And who knows what the head was thinking when it fell from the shoulders, seeking the ground and oblivion.”

“But I gather that wasn’t the end of Benedict di Caela,” I said finally, when the silence between us had grown uncomfortable, almost oppressive.

“Something it was in pronouncing him dead,” Bayard mused, “that indeed unraveled the fabric of things. When Gabriel the Younger struck Benedict down, it seemed as though that was the end of it, that the di Caelas could sit easily upon their wealth and holdings from that time forth. But in the old age of Gabriel the Younger it came—the first visitation of the curse on the family di Caela and the castle in which they lived—a plague of rats and the diseases the rats carry. Two of Gabriel the Younger’s sons were lost—the eldest to disease and the middle son to madness.

“It was the youngest this time who survived, who was forced to the most radical of methods to lift the curse. Quickly young Rowland ordered Castle di Caela evacuated, carrying the old man Gabriel the Younger out through the iron gates on his shoulders, the old man screaming and cursing in protest with every step. It was then he fired the castle, and as flames licked through the stony parapets, over the crenelations and in the upper rooms of the towers, it was said that you could hear the rats screaming and a scream above those tiny fevered screams which was lost in smoke and in the sound of old dry beams collapsing. All that was left was the stony shell of the walls, and Rowland di Caela rebuilt the castle from the inside, ruling wisely and peacefully for thirty years, until again the curse returned.

“It is here that the story clouds, for Castle di Caela has been visited by the curse for nigh onto twenty generations, and each time it takes a different form. For the flood failed when Simeon di Caela introduced sluices in the moatwork, and Antonio di Caela stopped the plains fires by opening the right sluices at the right time. The ogre invasions were turned away by Cyprian di Caela, and Theodore di Caela turned back the bandit armies headed by a mysterious, black-robed captain.

“Even the Cataclysm had a hand in Benedict’s foiling, for at the end of the fourth generation since the curse it was goblins and goblin miners and sappers who tunneled to within a hundred yards of Castle di Caela, filling the inhabitants with panic for the enemy was unseen, beneath them somewhere. When the Cataclysm came, shaking the very foundations of Krynn, the tunnels collapsed upon their makers, upon Benedict himself.

“So with each generation he has come, unwearying, relentless. In each generation he is turned back, by the eldest di Caela son, sometimes, and sometimes by the youngest or the middle son. Often by the sole surviving heir, for Benedict’s assaults, though ill-fated, take their recurrent toll.

“Upon this generation a silence has fallen, as Robert di Caela repelled the last attempt some forty years back, when he was a lad of sixteen. Since that time, the House of di Caela has dwelt in peace, and those in the surrounding country have for the most part concluded that, since the sole surviving heir to the holdings is the Lady Enid di Caela, and whomever she marries, her heirs will take their father’s name and the land will pass from the di Caela family forever.

“For the most part, they have concluded that. But the di Caela family is not so sure.”

“And thou, Sir Bayard?” Agion asked as Bayard paused once more in the telling. “I have heard this four-hundred-year-old story of wrongs and vengeances and violence neaped on injustices, and I must confess I have many questions. The largest of these is thy part in an ancient story of woe.”

“That, too, is a long story,” Bayard began, waving as though he’d had enough of stories for the afternoon.

“Oh, but tell us please, Sir Bayard!” Agion insisted. “Galen and I love stories!”

“Agion, perhaps Sir Bayard is a little tired, and . . .” “Never mind, Galen,” Bayard said wearily. “For both of you deserve to know, since all of this concerns you.”

And he began again, with another lurid tale, as his audience rode beside him.

“My childhood promised to be not unlike yours, Galen. I was the heir to a large castle in central Solamnia.”

“Which is very like my childhood, sir,” I agreed sarcastically. “For after all, I am about third down the line to inherit a rattrap of a moat house in northwest Coastlund.”

Bayard ignored me, bent on continuing his story, determined to teach me something or kill us both in the process. Is there any story of any successful man’s childhood that is not a hard luck tale?

“It was no soldiers of Neraka, no bandits from Estwilde, who were to rob me of my birthright, my castle and lands which took years to recover. No, none of our old enemies conspired to take my inheritance from me. Instead, it was our own people who rose against my father one summer night—around this time of year, it was, when I was fourteen. They killed my father and mother. Killed the house servants and retainers, too, for ‘harboring sympathy for the oppressors,’ it was. And when I was fourteen, they would have killed me, had not my good luck and their excitement conspired to save me.”

“The villains!” I exclaimed, thinking that exclaiming something was what was expected of me. I was wrong, evidently. Bayard turned to me, frowned, and shook his head.

“Not villains. Though I, too, thought so at fourteen, and swore to avenge myself upon them and all of their kind. I was too young to understand either their anger or my oath. Not villains, for the most vicious result of the Cataclysm—when the world collapsed and the landscape changed—was that the poor suffered first and most, Galen. I knew nothing of that at the time I swore my oath, knew nothing of the rage that arises when one sees someone not starving simply because he or she was born not to starve. I learned of that rage firsthand in Palanthas.”

“Palanthas?” I interrupted. “Let me get this straight. You were orphaned down near the Vingaard Keep, left alone at fourteen, and you still found the courage and the wherewithal for a week’s journey alone, through the Vingaard Mountains, to the city of Palanthas?”

Agion, too, had become attentive, the name “Palanthas” having roused his thoughts from nowhere. He turned and addressed my protector.

“Palanthas, Sir Bayard? Thou hast visited Palanthas?”

“Yes, Agion. And dwelt there.”

“Then perhaps thou canst tell me. Do they eat horses in Palanthas?”

I thought it was centaur superstition and prepared to laugh, but saw Bayard nodding in response.

“The poor do, Agion, when they can get them. But they get them rarely, and are forced to survive on other things. Indeed, I know this firsthand, as I was saying.”

He continued, his eyes on the road ahead of him, while I looked at Valorous, at the pack mare, and tried to imagine them gracing a table.

“. . . so the keep safely behind me, I rode half a mile away, to where I could no longer see the flames from the watch-tower, only the smoke. Then I picked up the westbound road and was out of my father’s lands, into what we once called ‘hostile country.’ Now it seemed to me that the hostile country was what I was leaving behind, what I would have inherited had the times stayed the same.”

He paused, drew Valorous to a halt.

“We’ll stop here and eat. A flank of goat can spoil even in brisk autumn weather, if you aren’t careful.”

Whatever had come to pass in Palanthas, and whatever it had to do with di Caelas, Sir Bayard Brightblade had learned the lessons of survival.

The story paused at the fireside, the goat flank turning on a makeshift spit, Agion standing, watching around us for anything drawn to the smell of roasting meat.

“Enough story for now,” Bayard insisted. “You should rest.”

I nodded, then cast a sideward glance at Agion, now idly nuzzling an apple and staring off behind us toward the west and the swamp he could probably barely remember.

I dozed awhile at that stopping place, as did Agion. Bayard picked up telling his tale to us where he had left off, when we were once again on the road southeast, passing through countryside flat and dreary—the landscape for which Coastlund is justly famous. As I watched a hawk wheeling in the deepest part of the eastern sky, he resumed.

“The journey to Palanthas was a perilous one, for the Vingaard Mountains are wretchedly cold at any season. Had it not been summer, the outcome of my story might well have been different.

“Palanthas, of course, is justly famous for its riches, for the library and the colleges and the splendid tower to which mages from all over Ansalon come to be tested and instructed. If that were all that pertained to the city, its love of learning and of wisdom,” he stated, smiling ironically, “I would surely have found better welcome there.”

I imagined the city of gold, a paradise seated on a hill overlooking drab countryside in all directions. I did not know then that, despite its riches and glimmer, Palanthas was a rough port town sloping into a deep water harbor, and that from that harbor came mariners who spoke in languages none of us had heard or would ever hear again, men who carried daggers with intricate handles and with poison lacing the toothed edges of the blades.

Bayard’s story was the first I had heard that hinted at the poverty, the dice and the knives upon which the city’s foundation lay. I listened, unbelieving at first, but the parts of Bayard’s story “went from one to the other,” as Alfric had said before he sank beneath a sea of swampy mud. Agion, however, needed less convincing. He nodded agreement throughout—not that he had been to Palanthas, of course, but that he was sure that the seamy side was the only side of human cities, where small, violent, two-legged creatures gathered in their places of stone and baked mud and dead wood.

“When I arrived in Palanthas,” Bayard explained, leaning forward and picking a burr from Valorous’s mane as the horse slowed to a walk, “there was nothing for me in the southern part of the city. Shops there were, and merchants everywhere you looked, and most cared nothing for buyers, intent as they were on buying the wares of other merchants in their attempts to be, say, the only tea merchant, or the only furrier in the city. Those who indeed were looking for someone who might buy their goods looked only to the rich—to the mages in coaches, to the spice traders in their gowns, who rode through the streets on their thoroughbred horses. Can you imagine keeping high-strung horses such as those pent in a city?

“No, there was no employment for me there. I could not even buy food with what little money I had saved from my room at the keep—these merchants were not interested in paltry sums.

“So to the west of town I went, through the ruins of the old temples devoted to gods these people had set aside because such gods were ‘inconvenient.’ It was here I saw the fabled Tower of High Sorcery, from a distance only and for a short time only. I had no energy to admire architecture. . . .”

Well, it gives you an idea. As Bayard spoke, went on with his tale, a layer of bitterness began to cover every event he touched upon. And I began to understand, when I heard how he slept on the docks, dodging the rats and the cutthroats and the press gangs, why he had turned to burglary when the hunger and the cold began to weigh upon him. Sir Bayard told us of how, finally, the hunger and cold had overwhelmed him in the midst of rifling the chests in a wealthy East End house, how he had found nothing but blankets, had wrapped himself in one and fallen asleep, only to wake in the custody of a Solamnic Knight who was staying in the house on a visit to Palanthas and had, consequently, carried few riches with him for a burglar’s taking. He told of how the Knight had known another Knight who had known another who had known Bayard’s father, and how only then—through this knowing of someone who knew—could he escape the cold and the hunger and the poverty. How only then, many years hence, a Solamnic army at his back, could he set about to recover his lands and the castle at Vingaard Keep.

“Given the circumstances, sir, I would have called upon any family connections I had myself,” I consoled, Agion nodding in agreement with me. “Your castle was yours, handed down through generations, and you simply used those friendships to drive out the rabble who had robbed you.”

“But there was no driving out to do against that so-called rabble,” Bayard explained. “For they had never taken up residence in the keep. They felt that if they lived in the luxury of those who had ‘oppressed’ them, as they called it, they might grow to be as ill-willed, as evil, as their oppressors.”

“Do you mean they preferred their straw-covered huts to the halls of Vingaard Keep?”

Bayard nodded.

It seemed impossible to believe.

“Then they deserved the driving out and whatever else befell them later, on grounds of sheer stupidity alone,”

I pronounced.

This time Agion was not as quick to agree, the prospect of thatched housing no doubt appealing more to his appetite than the prospect of stone walls. Nor did Bayard agree, shaking his head slowly, frowning, and squinting as he looked off to the eastern distances.

“Galen, I cannot answer that. What passes sometimes for sheer stupidity is principles in disguise.” He kept looking east, then nodded as though he had discovered something at the horizon’s edge, which indeed he had. He turned to me, spoke seriously and directly.

“I have just enough trouble with my own principles that I can’t pass judgement on someone else’s.” I sat back in the saddle, prepared for another pompous lecture, but instead Bayard nodded to the east and changed the subject.

“The Vingaard Mountains.”

“Sir?”

“The Vingaard Mountains. You’ll see them soon. You’d see them now if you knew how to look over distances.” He smiled, tugged on the pack mare’s reins and brought her abreast of Valorous. “We bear due east from here, and we should reach the mountains close to where the pass lies.”

They were black, those mountains, as the evening sky darkened to a deep blue. That night we camped under their shadows, the foliage around us just beginning to grow more sparse as the ground slanted upward and the soil became more rocky.

We slept heavily, or at least I did, and the morning found me no more fresh than when I bedded down the night before. Bayard shook me to wake me, and when shaking did little good, he nudged me with his foot. The side of the boot atop fresh saddle sores did not sit well, in a manner of speaking.

“Another brisk ride today, Galen,” he announced cheerfully—cheerfully and, indeed, energetically. “If we continue to ride briskly, and if the gods grant us a clear path and no obstacle upon the road, we can still be at the gates of Castle di Caela in five days, on the eve of the tournament.”

Chapter Ten

It is time for a story of my own.

This one takes place not long after Bayard told his story, and begins while we were clambering through the Vingaard Mountains on our way to Castle di Caela.

As Bayard had feared, the delays in the swamp had made us late, though not irretrievably late, for di Caela’s tournament. Still, the tournament waited for no one. Over two hundred Knights had gathered from all over Solamnia, all over Ansalon. The story is told that one Knight came from as far away as Balifor, wearing blue armor and an exotic array of yellow plumes, but he was long gone by the time we reached the castle, having been bested at once in the jousting lists so that he carried no lady back to those eastern mountains at the edge of the world, but a great bruise and a crack in his collarbone.

Yet the Blue Knight from Balifor was not the most unusual contestant to vie for the hand of the Lady Enid di Caela. When you draw contestants from all over the continent, you can rely on a number of them being a trifle . .

. outlandish.

There was Sir Orban of Kern, whose forked beard and eye patch made him look somewhat disreputable, almost piratical, though the story goes that no Knight carried within him a heart more innocent and noble. Perched on the shoulder of Sir Orban was a talking parrot, all orange and red and shifting in colors as the sunlight and the moonlight shifted. The parrot spoke constantly to Sir Orban, who answered him in kind, and indeed spoke little to anyone else.

There was Sir Prosper Inverno of Zeriak, the southernmost of the Solamnic Knights who had assembled there at Castle di Caela. His armor was thick and translucent like the Icewall Glacier that lay half a day’s journey from his holdings. Thick and translucent, and glittering like sapphires, so that those assembled wondered if it were made of ice or of precious stone. He wore the white skin of a bear around his shoulders, and there were stories that the air at his encampment was colder than that surrounding it, that even wine left in a cup by his tent was crusted with ice in the morning. But no matter the rumors, he was known as a lancer of surpassing skill and surpassing power, and no Knight wanted to draw his lot when the tournament began. Then there was Sir Ledyard of Southlund, who had spent, some said, too long on the seas. He had seen from a distance the Blood Sea of Istar and his eyes had turned red from the sight. Just as strange was the helmet he wore, with the swirl of conch shells fashioned in metal about the ears so that Sir Ledyard looked like something risen from the Blood Sea itself. Within that helmet, within the conch shells at the ears, it is rumored that the sea always sang, always called him back.

There was also Sir Ramiro of the Maw, a Knight more easterly than the Blue Knight of Balifor, and also more sizable: he must have weighed four hundred pounds, not counting his armor. He was constantly cheery, and fond of traveling songs—faintly obscene ones at that—and I am sure the Lady Enid breathed a sigh of relief when he fell to the Hooded Knight in the first day of the lists.

For the Hooded Knight was the one who set Castle di Caela most abuzz with rumor and speculation. He came on the last night before the tournament began, and he pitched camp a good two miles west of the castle walls, away from all other contestants. Many of the Knights, even the easygoing Sir Ramiro, shivered uneasily on the tournament eve when they looked westward unto the Hooded Knight’s encampment, black and silhouetted against the blood red setting sun.

Sir Robert di Caela himself was troubled at the presence, though he did not know why, and found himself looking westward beyond that farthest encampment, looking to the feet of the Vingaard Mountains for some sign of movement, some glint of last light off of the fabled armor of the approaching Bayard Brightblade—some sign that we were there at last. Then Sir Robert could commence the events with confidence, knowing that destiny was in the wings, that the Brightblade he had awaited had come at last.

But when darkness fell, Sir Robert turned from the battlements in disappointment, for the Brightblade had not come, was surely delayed on the road. Meanwhile, more rumors began to spread through the camp. The Hooded Knight was said to be the heir of a family outcast from Solamnic Orders, who had come to the tournament in the hopes that victory might reinstate his family and win back the honor they had lost generations back at the Cataclysm.

Or the Hooded Knight was an enchanter cursed to wander the earth until he could win a tournament such as this. Then, released from the curse and from his bondage to this sad earth, he would vanish, leaving nothing behind.

Or the Hooded Knight was Sir Bayard Brightblade in disguise, for he had come without attendants, and wasn’t it so that Bayard had been wandering through Coastlund in search of a squire?

These stories and more Sir Robert took in that night in the master bedroom of Castle di Caela. As he pondered all of these stories, there was a knocking at the gates and an outcry from the guards—brief and startled, but whether joyous or fearful Sir Robert could not tell.

It is too late to pay respects this night, Sir Robert thought, or so he told me. Whoever it is can wait until morning, for the list will go nowhere overnight.

But then he thought of Sir Bayard Brightblade, somewhere on the road to Castle di Caela. Who knew? He might be outside the gates, awaiting Solamnic courtesy—a warm room, a cup of wine, a polite and ceremonious entering of his name in tomorrow’s lists.

Buoyed by his imaginings, Sir Robert rose from his bed, his joints no doubt creaking and cracking. I can see him now—see him, and hear it all as though it is happening before me. Sir Robert puts on his armor over his nightshirt, his helmet over his nightcap, and there before the looking glass in the bedroom—the mirror that is one of the last relics of a wife who died beautiful and far too young—the old man adjusts the breastplate and the shimmering visor, trying for a balance between comfort and dignity.

Not bad for a man of fifty, he is thinking. The hair a little yellow-gray, no doubt, and the poundage straining a bit at the laces of the armor. But all in all, not a far cry from the days in active duty, and certainly good enough to receive the likes of these young combatants.

Who, except for Sir Bayard Brightblade and perhaps a couple of others, are only pale copies of the Knights who manned the Orders in my youth.

Down the stairs he starts, coughing a little at the hour and the cold. Somewhere in the recesses of the castle, three mechanical cuckoos whir and call out. Sir Robert fumbles with a candle, which flickers briefly and fades, leaving him in the dark. He swears a mild oath and reaches above him, seeking to light the wick from the glowing remnants of a torch on the wall.

It is then that he hears the voice, rising from the foot of the stairs. Even though he has never met the man, he knows this is not Bayard Brightblade as he had hoped; that it is the Hooded Knight who has pitched camp far to the west, who has waited for darkness before coining to the castle to pay respects and to sign for the lists.

“I assume you are Sir Robert di Caela?” the Knight asks out of the darkness. And di Caela thinks of a dozen things to say—of angry, brave words, of sharp retorts that would let this trespasser know that around this castle we conduct business in the daylight hours—but when he hears the cold, wasted words from the Knight at the bottom of the stairs, it is all he can do to answer with a feeble yes.

Sir Robert finds himself backing into the bedroom. Those legs that served him well in a hundred tournaments, that stood stalwart in the pass at Chaktamir where my father became a hero, are moving now before he has even noticed. He stops himself, wonders why he has to summon so much courage to do so. At the bottom of the stairs there is movement.

“I have come, Sir Robert, to pay respects,” the voice says icily. “Yours is a splendid castle, splendid and well-kept. Its restorations are scarcely noticeable, which shows the handiwork of a master craftsman.”

“Thank you,” begins Sir Robert, recovering from the ill ease, the unnameable fear of the moment past.

“Thank you, Sir Knight, though a knowledge of restoration and of castle decorations is, I fear, beyond me. I am a rough man who drops crystal by accident, the kind of man who wipes his chin on the tablecloth when he should be polished, refined, a fitting heir for his old family forebears.”

“If that is your greatest failing as a Knight, Sir Robert,” soothes the dark voice, “you may hand over your holdings to your heirs, knowing . . . you have served in all ways well. It is my guess that the state of your holdings—your finances, your lands, the welfare of your servants and your tenants—is as healthy as the look of your castle.”

“Well, well,” di Caela blusters, leaning heavily against the door frame, no longer certain that he dislikes this visitor altogether—indeed, seeing within the young fellow a certain . . . discernment, a wisdom beyond his years, to know how hard an estate could be in the upkeep, how it could sap a man of energy and of needful sleep. Indeed, were it not that he expects Bayard Brightblade to arrive at any moment . . .

“I assume you have come to put your name in the lists, young fellow,” Sir Robert begins heartily, and the man steps into light on the stairwell.

He is dressed in black, as though in mourning for someone dear to him, Sir Robert notes. And the hood over his face is not nearly as menacing as old Ramiro made it out to be.

No doubt it is some kind of sorrow he is trying to live down, trying to live past.

“You must be the one they call the Hooded Knight,” Sir Robert states—no question in his voice because he is unaccustomed to questions. Questions, indeed, are weakness.

“Gabriel Androctus,” comes the voice from the folds of the black cloth, calmly and smoothly. “It will sound better in the lists. Less . . . theatrical.”

“Step forward, lad!” Sir Robert exclaims, this time even more heartily. “Come into my quarters while I find a quill.”

But Sir Gabriel stands on the lowest step and does not budge.

“Are you deaf, young fellow? Step forward!”

“Ah, but it’s late, Sir Robert. Later no doubt than . . . either of us knows,” soothes Sir Gabriel. “Now that I have paid respects, have entered the lists, I beg your dismissal, so that I might return to my encampment. The night is short, and I should be rested for tomorrow’s contest.”

“Indeed, indeed,” Sir Robert calls over his shoulder, halfway back to his desk where the quill sits in the inkwell, where the rolled parchment list of tomorrow’s contestants lies tied with a velvet ribbon. He unrolls the list and hears the sound of a door closing distantly below him. He sets the pen to the page, pulls it back with an oath.

“I forgot to ask Sir Gabriel where he comes from, damn it!”

But the halls below are silent. Outside a horse whickers in the stable, and the night gives way to the call of owls and the slow whirring of crickets.

As the tournament lists are displayed the next morning, Sir Gabriel’s name is listed without place or lineage at the bottom of the scroll. Of course, Sir Robert wishes he had gathered that information, had completed the lists in proper ceremony.

But the name is there, joining those of the rest of the Knights assembled. What more could a man ask, who prepares to give his daughter to the most resourceful, the most gifted of Solamnic manhood?

He could ask for Bayard Brightblade to be there.

Sir Robert stands at the window of the low tower and looks west across the pennants flapping from the tents in the encampment. There is Ramiro’s great bear, the fish in its jaws, and beyond it Sir Prospers silver mountain of ice. Beyond that still is the strange, flat black banner of Gabriel Androctus. Beyond that, the mountains, with no rising dust on the paths leading east and downward. Bayard is not coming. Not yet.

Sir Robert exhales heatedly. His squire begins the burdensome process of helping the old man into the ceremonial bronze armor and the chore over at last, hands him the shield bearing the standard of the House di Caela—red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field.

Sir Robert descends the tower stairway. It is time to begin the three days’ ceremony of giving away his daughter. Of giving away his last name, for in the generations that follow, this place will no longer be known as Castle di Caela—of that much, he is certain.

Castle Inverno, perhaps?

Or Castle Androctus?

Pausing on the landing in the long and winding stairway, he looks once more out the western window. Nothing at the foot of the mountains.

Well then, thinks Sir Robert di Caela resignedly, let the tournament begin.

As the morning warms toward noon and the Knights assemble, the elaborate preliminaries that mark a Solamnic tournament take place one by one: first, the prayers, led by the white-robed clerics, to the Great Dragon, to Kiri-Jolith, and to Mishakal—for honor and for skill in the lists and for no wounds mortal. Then the blessings of the bards, with songs to Huma and to Vinas Solamnus and to Gerald di Caela who fathered the family in whose name this tournament is given.

By the time of the blessings, nearly all of the Knights are there—more than fifty assembled. Four of the most prominent are late.

Sir Prosper Inverno does not arrive until the white-robed clerics of Mishakal are singing the praises of Kiri-Jolith, lord of battle. The large man passes on foot through the ranks of the Knights, his mysterious translucent armor glittering. A murmur arises when the Knights are aware just who it is who walks among them. Sir Robert smiles at the entrance: he has heard southerners have a gift for the dramatic. Easterners, on the other hand, are at the mercy of less premeditated impulses. Or at least one easterner, for Sir Ramiro of the Maw arrives as the prayers to Mishakal are ending, too late to receive the healthful benedictions of her priests. Apologetically he nods to Sir Robert, who can tell from his eyes that the wine was flowing freely in his encampment last night and has left him drained, aching, and tardy this morning. No doubt his indulgence has ruined his slim chance for victory, as Sir Robert knows it has done in other tournaments at other times. Later still is Sir Gabriel Androctus, conspicuously absent through the prayers, through the bardic songs, through the arming of the contestants. He only appears at the last possible moment, when the trumpets sound and the Knights step forth as the herald reads their names from the scroll. It is then, as the reading begins, that Robert di Caela sees Sir Gabriel, already armed and mounted, already with lance in hand, riding his horse at a walk through the milling contestants.

It is no surprise that his armor is black. Again Sir Robert feels the uneasiness he did last night on the stairway and wonders why he signed on this man so amiably.

Must’ve still been half asleep, he thinks. But surely Orban or Prosper . , .

Surely their lances will do the work before it comes to . . .

He gazes, this time with dwindling patience and a rising anger, toward the foot of the mountains to the west. So much for Brightblade and destiny, he thinks. So much for prophecy.

Though Sir Robert would never arrange the drawing of the lots so as to provide a disturbing Knight—say, Gabriel Androctus—with a formidable opponent—say, the Blue Knight of Balifor—he breathes more easily when those are the lots drawn. When their lots fall from the silver ceremonial helmet, the number “3” falls in kind from the gold, signaling that they would be the third joust of the day.

Good. It will be over with soon.

Sir Robert muses through the first two lists—contests which are over almost as quickly as they begin. Sir Ledyard and Sir Orban dispose of two young, ungainly Knights from Lemish. Ledyard’s effortless victory, in fact, gives rise to a quip from Ramiro that “if Sir Ledyard is the flower of Southlund, is his opponent the blemish of Lemish?”

Sir Robert would usually laugh long and loudly at such foolishness, especially when phrased in Ramiro’s peculiar eastern accent. So too would he usually laugh at the dancing bear and the jesters who clown in front of the viewing stands while all wait for the next contest. But now he is silent, attentive to the next contest on the day’s card, as the tourney marshals set about the lengthy business of positioning the next two Knights—the Blue Knight of Balifor and the mysterious, black-garbed Gabriel Androctus.

Finally, the herald’s trumpet sounds, and the jester act breaks off to a scattered applause from the servants and the less attentive Knights and ladies. Those who know the jousts have already turned their attention to the contestants, each at a far end of the grounds, half concealed by the rising, churning dust. The Knights hold the lances “in arrest,” as they say—in upright position, so that they tower like flagpoles or obelisks nearly twenty feet into the warm afternoon air.

Androctus is lefthanded, Sir Robert notices with concern. It will make it more confusing for the Blue Knight. But he has faced more daunting problems before, judging from the stories.

At the trumpeted signal from the herald, both men are to close their visors and proffer lances—a sign of preparedness to each other, a sign that the contest should begin.

But here we have a problem. The visors of both Knights have been closed since they appeared this morning, each preferring the drama of his anonymity.

A drama Sir Robert rapidly resents.

“Gentlemen, raise your visors!” he calls out in his most official, most theatrical voice. As he expects and maliciously enjoys, there is hesitation from both parties.

Then, to his surprise, the black-armored Knight raises his visor. It is a pale face—one that women might call handsome, but men would certainly call dangerous. Sir Robert wishes his daughter Enid were beside him, keen judge of faces that she is. But she is not in attendance, having chosen to remain in her quarters and having dismissed the entire event as “so much well-dressed hooliganry.” So he is left to his own resources. But the face in the helmet is as inscrutable as that of an icon or a dead man. It is the face of a man who looks somewhere between twenty and sixty years old—Sir Robert can determine no more closely than that. The eyes are green—a pale, almost yellowish green, and the eyelids unnaturally red, as though painted clumsily or unaccustomed to light.

It is a terribly familiar face, for all its eeriness.

Sir Robert scarcely even looks at the Blue Knight. He is never sure whether Sir Gabriel’s opponent raises and lowers his visor. For the Hooded Knight closes his helmet with an echoing snap, leans back in the saddle, and proffers his heavy lance in his right hand—taking no unseemly advantage.

It takes horses of this size—the huge bay destriers of Abanasinia—a few moments to get moving. The large legs and thighs, the barrel chest of the horse are heavy weights, not to mention the armored knight on its back, and to attain anything close to jousting speed takes time, takes muscle. But once such a horse is moving, it is virtually unstoppable, like an avalanche or the cascading flow of a river out of the mountains. Straight on at the approaching black Knight, the Blue Knight of Balifor spurs his horse, and for a moment the big animal under him shies and whickers, sensing perhaps some unexpected turn in the contest. But soon both men, mounted and armed and lances at the ready, rush toward the center of the grounds, where two pennants—one solid sky-blue, the other black as the eye of the raven—flutter from lofty flagstaffs. In an instant they collide and their lances splinter. In an instant the Blue Knight topples from his horse to a clatter of armor, leaving one iron-blue boot in the stirrup as the frightened animal gallops off dustily, pursued by the marshal on horseback and by grooms on foot. At the site of the collision, the Blue Knight lies virtually still. For a moment his helmeted head rises slowly, as though he is trying to get to his feet. Then the head sinks down, and the body writhes in pain.

Sir Robert is to his feet at once, thinking of fraud, of some tricky and marginally legal pass with the lance. But everything had seemed clean—scrupulously so—and as the Blue Knight’s squire and other attendants rush to the side of their master, Sir Robert looks once more at the victor.

Sir Gabriel seems indifferent to the suffering of his opponent, having made no gesture to ask chivalrously after the well-being of a fallen adversary, as did Orban and even the eccentric, sea-changed Sir Ledyard. Instead, the black Knight sits his horse at the edge of the grounds, broken lance in arrest. Slowly he walks the big destrier toward the viewing stands, and when he is directly in front of Sir Robert, he raises the visor once more. The look is ironic, the smile as cold as the mountain wastes. It is a smile that stays with Sir Robert through the long first afternoon of the tournament, the sounds of lances breaking and of cheering fading in his ears until they become trivial background noise to his troubled musings, noises like those the mechanical cuckoos make that night in the halls of Castle di Caela, as Sir Robert, having dismissed his servants for the evening, paces hectically in his unkempt chambers.

Surely tomorrow. This Sir Gabriel Androctus will find his match in Sir Orban of Kern. There was a time when Orban’s lance was known from here to Tarsi’s.

Sir Robert sleeps fitfully, hoping that the time of Orban’s lance is not over.

It is the fifth contest of the next day, according to the lots drawn from the golden helmet. Sir Robert is surly in impatience, this morning having scolded the Lady Enid virtually to tears (his own tears, mind you, for when scolded, the Lady Enid scolds back!). It is even rumored that on his way to the lists he slapped a dawdling servant.

It is as though a cloud has spread over the fields of contest, as Sir Robert di Caela sits sullenly, anxiously in the viewing stands through four lists he does not care about, waiting for the moment in which Sir Orban and the dark Gabriel Androctus break lances.

It comes at last, in the middle of the afternoon. The champions mount their destriers at opposite ends of the grounds, and their squires walk to the front of the viewing stands to present the champions’ regards to the host of the tournament. Sir Orban’s squire is a handsome, dark-haired lad inclining to heftiness, the nephew of Sir Ramiro of the Maw, who was defeated by his own wine and by Sir Prosper Inverno on the first day of the tournament. Ramiro, escorted by some unidentified young woman, now sits in the audience next to Sir Robert. They all are applauding the manners of this portly nephew.

Sir Gabriel’s squire, on the other hand, is as great a mystery as his protector. A slight figure hooded in black, he had not attended the first day’s contest; indeed, everyone thought that Sir Gabriel had arrived alone. No matter who he is or where he comes from, the squire is proficient: he recites the ceremonial words flawlessly and without warmth, returning at once to the side of his protector. Now slowly the squires lead the horses to the spots where visors close, where lances are proffered.

Again, Sir Gabriel Androctus makes a point of switching his lance from the left hand to the right. Sir Robert di Caela swears a most un-Solamnic oath under his breath.

The villain is saying he can beat him with the off hand, Sir Robert thinks. And wonders if Sir Gabriel Androctus will make good his boast.

The first pass goes better than yesterday’s, Sir Robert thinks, as the Knights cross paths, each splintering his lance against the other’s bulky shield. Both Knights rise in the stirrups at collision, and Sir Robert’s teeth grind, his shoulder wrenches with the remembered pain of tournaments long past.

Each of the Knights turns his destrier about and reaches out his hand for another lance. The charge begins again at a signal from the marshal. The horses lurch forward like huge, ungainly wagons, and the Knights lean forward in the saddles, lances proffered and menacing.

On the second pass things change, profoundly and terribly. With a crash and the shrieking sound of metal scraped and twisted, Sir Gabriel’s lance strikes Sir Orban’s shield full on, and the sheer impact drives the weapon through the layers of metal and leather, then again into metal as the lance-head dives into Orban’s breastplate.

At once Sir Robert and Sir Ramiro are on their feet, calling foul. For no doubt the Hooded Knight’s weapons had been sharpened beforehand, arms extreme instead of arms courteous—not blunted and padded, as the tournament rules had demanded.

All of this makes no difference to the downed Sir Orban. Twice he tries to rise, and the second time, with a great and painful groan, manages to climb to his knees. There, covered in dust and earth, blood beginning to trickle from the tattered dent in the breastplate, blood trickling also between the vents in the visor as he coughs and coughs again, Sir Orban reels on his knees and falls face first just before the attendants reach him. His hefty squire, drawing strength from his outrage and panic, turns the armored body onto its back with a quick, smooth movement.

He opens the visor and bursts into tears.

“Receive his soul to Huma’s breast,” whispers Sir Ramiro.

Sir Orban’s parrot shrieks as though it is on fire.

Strong arms seize Gabriel Androctus, who opens his visor and stares with bloodless anger at the sorrow and commotion on the tournament grounds. He smiles faintly once: that is when the head of the lance is drawn from the breastplate still bearing, to the astonishment of everyone, the padding wrapped tightly about it.

“Arms courteous” he says. “By your rules, di Caela.”

By sheer force, unaided by blade or point or sharpened edge, he has driven his wooden lance into an armored opponent.

The marshals loosen their hold, out of astonishment. Androctus, not bothering to dismount, rides his destrier from the tournament grounds to his tent beyond the western edge of the encampments. His opponent for the next morning withdraws from the lists. It is a Knight from Ergoth, Sir Lyndon of Rocklin. The Knight and his host stand in the great hall of Castle di Caela. A chair lies in fragments in front of Sir Robert, where he has dashed it to the ground in his fury.

To his outraged host, Lyndon explains:

“I know how this looks, Sir Robert, and how it reflects ill on me. But despite the hooded gentleman’s assertions, despite the padding found upon the broken lance, something is surpassingly wrong here, surpassingly unfair in the doings of that black-garbed man.”

“I know, Lyndon, and by Huma we’ve done our damnedest to find him out. We have given that lance the once-over . . . the twice-over! Unless my eyes are bad, unless the marshals themselves are blind, Sir Gabriel has done nothing visibly unlawful. Terrifying, yes, in its clean and blind . . . brutality. But not unlawful.”

“Nonetheless,” maintains Sir Lyndon, “not the Lady Enid nor her considerable inheritance is enough to compromise my honor. And compromised it would be, were I to tilt against one who had advanced unfairly through the ranks of the tournament, killing a most admirable Knight in his treachery.”

“Do not confuse honor with fear, Sir Lyndon,” booms a voice from the entrance to the hall. It is Prosper Inverno of Zeriak, come to the great hall of Castle di Caela after his victory in the lists against Sir Ledyard.

“Impressive show of arms today, Inverno,” Sir Robert manages to say, drawing his anger under control at the arrival of his honored guest.

“I thank you, Sir Robert,” Sir Prosper replies cheerily. “Had I not unhorsed Sir Ledyard, he would have stood here instead of me. Indeed, I bear more bruises than he does, but he bears a large bruise, I am sure, where it will make it most uncomfortable for him to sit horse tomorrow. The fall was comical, and like a true Knight, he took it with laughter.”

Laughing softly and wearily, Sir Prosper walks to the center of the room. His dark green tunic is torn at the right shoulder, where Ledyard’s lance has battered against the incomparable translucent armor. Prosper seats himself gingerly, slowly. His legs ache from grasping the huge sides of the destrier.

“So, Lyndon. You’re about to withdraw and leave this . . . Grim Reaper to me?” He smiles, leans back in the chair, and crosses his legs painfully.

“The least you could do is bruise him a little this morning—soften him up for the afternoon’s joust against me.”

“B-but, Sir Prosper!”

“Never mind, Lyndon. Many’s the time I’ve broken lances with five opponents in a day. One more upstart with a self-important sense of his own mystery should be easy enough to handle.”

“But your honor, Sir Prosper. Up against one who has fought unfairly? If it were battle, where it is kill or be killed, and no questions, that would be one thing. But a tournament is, after all, sport, and I do not believe that Sir Gabriel Androctus has fought altogether . . .”

“Enough, Lyndon!” storms Sir Prosper. “You think this is still sport, while Orban is lying dead in a wagon at his tents, his attendants and squire weeping and assembling his belongings? How would you like to be that squire and have to tell old Alban of Kern that his son died in a tournament run under arms courteous and the killer went on to win the prize?

“No, Sir Lyndon,” Prosper concludes. “Sir Gabriel Androctus fights once more this afternoon, and by the Order, I mean to see that he loses.”

Now is the time of emissaries to the tent. For Sir Robert sends a messenger in secret to Gabriel Androctus, asking that the final joust be postponed until the following morning. Then, he maintains, a brief period of mourning for Sir Orban may be observed before his entourage leaves with the body for Kern. Though this is certainly in Sir Robert’s mind when he asks for the postponement, there is also the hope that a night’s rest will help Sir Prosper set aside fatigue and stiffness—that morning will find him battle fit and ready to consign this Gabriel Androctus back to whatever pit of snakes he had crawled out of to attend this tournament. It is not to be.

The answer returns, scrawled on a note in a bold and flashing script—the writing of an artist, no doubt, or of a man assured in his resources and afraid of nothing.

Nonsense. Why should we change procedure at the whim of a corpse?

The tournament must continue. Sir Prosper drew a worthy adversary this morning; I, an unworthy one. Such are the lots in tournament. As I recall, he picked his first from the helmet. Such are the rules you established. Follow them.

Seated at the desk in his chambers, Sir Robert reads the note he has been handed. He dismisses the messenger, and when the boy leaves, reads it again.

He sighs deeply and in resignation. He holds the note above a guttering candle and watches it catch fire in the last breath of the wick. He holds the burning note as long as he can before casting the withering paper onto the hearth.

So the last tilt of the tournament begins, and still there is time left to see the hopes of Sir Robert di Caela rise and fall and rise, only to fall again.

For as always, in the long, tedious preparation of Knights that precedes the announcements and the proffering of lances, Sir Robert scans the horizon—almost by reflex now, for he has given up hope of seeing Sir Bayard Brightblade approach from the foot of the Vingaard Mountains.

And yet . . .

What is that, stirring the dust some several miles to the west, there where the plains fade into purple at the edge of the foothills?

The stirring of dust nears and resolves itself into a figure on horseback, riding full tilt for the castle. As the figure draws nearer, out of the shadow of the mountains to where it catches the sunlight, Sir Robert sees the unmistakable glint of distant armor.

Brightblade?

By Huma’s blood, would that it were so! For if it is, he is Gabriel Androctus’s next opponent. It will be hours of argument with that rule-bound precisian Androctus, hours of searching for precedent in the Solamnic Measure of Knighthood. I would not be surprised if the Hooded Knight insists that the castle scribes and priests and scholars search all thirty-seven volumes of the Measure, Sir Robert thinks. But even if I lose the appeal to the Measure, I will buy valuable time for Prosper.

That is, of course, if the figure on the road is Brightblade.

Sir Robert raises his hand, calls a halt to the preparations. A rider approaches, he announces. Approaches rapidly from the west. These are troubled times, when a rapidly approaching rider may signal uprising, invasion, or the gods know what. In light of the times and the situation, then, he requests that “the two remaining contestants stay the first pass for but a little while, until the rider arrives and we know if there is pressing business at hand or” . . . and Robert di Caela laughs . . . “or if it’s simply a young man late for a good seat at the final tilt.”

Prosper of Zeriak nods politely.

Androctus, on the other hand, is not pleased. He sends message by his hooded squire that the final tilt was scheduled for this hour, and that if Sir Robert is a man of his word, the tilt will begin as scheduled. This is too much. Sir Robert leans forward in his chair and shouts at the squire.

“Tell your Knight, Gabriel Androctus, that I called this tournament together on my lands. At my expense. For the hand of my daughter. And given that arrangement, tell Gabriel Androctus . . .”

With that. Sir Robert turns from the squire to the Knight, sitting atop his black destrier at the edge of the grounds, and raising his voice even further, until Sir Ramiro flinches beside him and the unknown but beautiful companion of Sir Ramiro stops up her ears, he shouts so loudly that even the thick-necked destriers startle:

“That on this matter, I shall do as I damn well please!”

It is high drama—Sir Robert’s finest moment in the last three sorry days. Unfortunately, all of this shouting has a sorry outcome.

For the rider is not Bayard Brightblade at all, but a slow-witted, red-haired boy from Coastlund, dressed in armor that shines from only the shoulders up, since the breastplate and everything below it is caked with a dark, sandy mud, with dried algae and pigcress, and with other, even more foul-smelling things. A Pathwarden, the boy is. Sir Robert remembers his father, and wonders how a fine old Knight such as Andrew could have sired this sniveling wreckage.

The boy announces his desire to enter the tournament for the hand of the Lady Enid di Caela. The viewing stands erupt with laughter, and Sir Prosper, conscious of the boy’s hurt dignity, sweeps his lance mightily through the air. Out of respect for Prosper, the laughter dies.

All except for one man’s. From across the tournament grounds, Gabriel Androctus’s laughter rises—melodious and deep and almost beautiful. Enid di Caela hears this laughter through the open window of her chambers, wonders whose it is, and walks to the window.

Where she views for the first time any of this tournament, sees Sir Prosper of Zeriak, whom she recognizes from his cloudy, translucent armor, squared off against the man who laughed—a handsome Knight in black armor, whom despite his handsomeness, she dislikes instantly.

She notices that he is lefthanded. Though she has seldom watched a tournament, she knows that lefthanders spread confusion in the lists.

Enid di Caela finds herself fearing for Prosper of Zeriak. Though she would not delight in being Sir Prosper’s much younger, much brighter wife, she knows him for a good man.

On the other hand, she knows nothing of the black-armored Knight except that he killed Orban of Kern and that his very looks, though handsome and refined, make her flesh crawl.

Below the Lady Enid’s vantage point, the two destriers paw the earth impatiently. They are purebred warhorses, and eager to match strength and speed.

Such is also the case with Sir Prosper of Zeriak. He nods graciously, Solamnically, to his opponent. He shuts his visor and proffers his lance.

The Hooded Knight, Gabriel Androctus, stands immobile like a huge onyx statue at the end of the tournament grounds. Finally, as the herald glances to Sir Robert then raises the trumpet to his lips, Sir Gabriel’s lance drops to the ready. The destriers lurch forward, churning the ground behind them, and the final joust for the hand of Enid di Caela begins.

For two such skilled and accomplished Knights, the first pass is tentative, even awkward. Androctus, no doubt daunted by his opponent’s reputation, gives Sir Prosper and his huge cream-colored destrier a wide berth in the lists, and Sir Prosper feints clumsily with the big lance, clearly adjusting to the shield attached to his opponent’s right arm.

Lesser men would have undone themselves in the first pass, scrambling to topple their opponents at once in a flashy, obvious stroke. But poised and patient—what the older Knights called scientific—Sir Gabriel and Sir Prosper pass each other again, then once more. Only at the fourth pass does lance strike shield. The older, more experienced Knights, Sir Robert and Sir Ramiro included, settle back, expecting a long afternoon. Even the oldest, most veteran of Knights is surprised at the next pass. For it is as though each man discovers a weakness in the other’s defenses, and exploits it immediately. At the fifth pass the lances splinter, Sir Prosper’s striking Sir Gabriel’s shield head on, sending the Hooded Knight tumbling off the right flank of his destrier, where he catches his foot in the stirrup, is dragged a few paces, then tumbles free of the horse and scrambles unsteadily to his feet.

Sir Gabriel’s lance in turn has hit Sir Prosper’s shield head on, and as in the fateful tilt with Sir Orban, explodes through toward the breastplate of the charging Knight. But Prosper, though older, is quicker than his late comrade in arms: a lightening twist to his left avoids the padded end of the lance, which shoots by him at the speed of a meteor. Still, Sir Prosper’s turn in the saddle costs him his balance. He falls over the central railing of the lists and lands on his side, rising painfully by pulling himself up along the side of the railing. For a moment, surely each man thinks he has lost. Then, seeing his opponent dismounted, each draws his sword with renewed confidence and wades toward the other.

Ten feet from each other they stop. Sir Prosper reaches to the blade of his sword, blunted carefully in tournament fashion.

“Arms extreme, Sir Gabriel?” he asks, ceremoniously, politely, and coldly.

“If our host permits,” Sir Gabriel agrees. “After all,” he pronounces loudly, “Sir Robert has reminded us that it is his tournament.”

“Arms extreme” Sir Robert declares, without hesitation.

“Then so be it,” declares Sir Gabriel, and holds out his hand, into which the hooded squire slips a wickedly sharp sword. The squire of Sir Prosper follows suit.

Slowly and warily, the two Knights circle one another. Then, with snakelike quickness, they close. They lock blades.

“I can’t even follow the swordplay,” Sir Ramiro whispers to Sir Robert, then starts to say something else. But in that moment a flickering movement from Gabriel’s wrist strikes home. Sir Prosper wobbles, a deep and draining cut on the back of his right leg. It is all but over: tendons severed in the back of his knee.

“N-now, see here, Sir Gabriel!” Sir Robert cries out into the sudden silence of the tournament grounds.

“Don’t you think this is enough?”

“Enough?” Sir Gabriel calls back calmly. “Oh, hardly enough.” Another abrupt move of the dodging left hand, and Sir Prosper falls to his knees, then over face first, completely hamstrung. Still, never an outcry from Prosper. He is completely silent in the pain and in the prospect of pain—and worse—to come.

“You’ve won the tournament, my holdings, Enid’s hand,” pleads Sir Robert. “Now stay your sword.”

“Who was it agreed to arms extreme!” asks Sir Gabriel. “For once, Sir Robert, for once in the history of your family, abide by your word.”

For the last time, lightning-quick, the sword hand flashes down upon the defenseless head of Sir Prosper of Zeriak, who looks southward impassively in that moment before the blade strikes home.

So on the Sunday next, four days from now, Sir Robert di Caela will give the hand of his daughter Enid to her betrothed, Sir Gabriel Androctus. With his daughter’s hand he will give, in time to come, the lands and holdings of the di Caela family. He will give Castle di Caela itself.

Chapter Eleven

While all of this happened, we were still in the Vingaard Mountains.

In the steep foothills, our progress had slowed considerably as a heavy rain washed down over the trails. Agion and Bayard had been forced to stop on two occasions, fell some nearby trees, and lay logs across the mired trail—because, mired or not, off-road was so steep it was impassable for horses, and the road was our only way through the mountains without going back and around and missing the tournament entirely. After two days of mire and sludge and misery, we had begun to climb even more steeply, into a landscape of solid rock that formed the mountains themselves. That morning was gray but surprisingly cheery, for the sun rose veiled behind the clouds, and the promise of rain or worse weighed less heavily on all of us. Bayard rode at the lead of our party, flamboyant on Valorous.

The horse was obedient and danced gracefully on the pathway ahead of Agion, who was lost in the delight of an armful of apples he had gathered, and who carried me, sulking, on his back. I in turn was leading by the rein a pack mare whose sullenness had no doubt passed into smoldering rage back at the swamp, when Bayard returned the showy, burdensome Solamnic armor to her load.

The road began to level off at midmorning, and it was like passing through to the other side of the season. The grasslands of Coastlund, not yet lost entirely to autumn, faded to brown once we climbed into the foothills of the mountains, the rich soil that was the source of so much boring greenery and scenery giving way to a stingier, rockier ground beneath us.

It was getting on toward evening, and we had yet to reach Bayard’s remembered pass when we first saw the ogre. He was a hefty creature, dressed in full battle armor, his powerful thick legs rising to a chest as huge around as a vallenwood trunk, and broad shoulders atop that, upon which sat a helmet surprisingly small. His fangs were yellowed and as twisted as cypress trees. His knobbed feet seemed to sprout from the metal legs of the armor as though he was sending out deep, grotesque roots into the rocks. He carried a trident and net, as though he had come from the sea. His horse looked freighted and unhappy.

About him the air seemed to shimmer gray, shimmer black. It was as though something within the armor was on fire. The bare branches of the scrawny mountain trees that lined the trail bent away from him as though he were poison or an intense and unforgiving cold.

Ahead of me Bayard nodded, made as if to pass, but the monster reined his horse into Valorous’s path and stood there. Bayard saluted-and tried to pass on the other side, but again found the ogre in his way. From beneath me Agion called out, “The thing hath little courtesy, Sir Bayard. Don thine armor and civilize it.”

Bayard tried to pass the creature once more and was again obstructed. Now Agion’s suggestion sounded better to him. He wheeled Valorous about and trotted back to the pack mare, where he dismounted, dragged the armor to the ground, and began to dress.

“Well, squire?” he asked, looking up at me from the disarray of metal he had scattered across the ground.

“Well, sir?”

“Isn’t it your squirely duty to help me on with this?”

We sat there assembling in front of the monstrosity. I worked frantically, guessing which buckle went where, which strap tied over which, even which direction the visor faced as I slipped the iron helmet over Bayard’s head. Finally, Bayard stood pieced together before me, and I boosted him back atop Valorous. Agion stepped aside, too chivalrous to join the fight that was about to take place, and too dense to see the great advantage there would be if he only cast chivalry aside.

Of course I thought about turning and running. But I knew I would not get far on foot, and that the big savage would kill Bayard first, then Agion, then ride me down over the rocky foothills, tying my severed ears to his bridle as some sort of barbarian trophy. As Gileandos said, my imagination was “prone to frolic at disaster’s edge,” and it was frolicking now, through fields of murder and torture and every kind of mutilation for which there was a body part to be disfigured.

Bayard mounted, drew his sword, and spurred Valorous off in a canter toward Sir Enormity, who stood waiting calmly, clutching his trident with both hands.

Disaster drew closer when Valorous broke to a full gallop and Bayard raised his sword. Instead of lunging with the trident, our huge enemy backed away from Sir Bayard’s charge and, as casually as if he were beating a rug, swung the trident at the passing figure, catching Bayard with the flat side of the tines and sending him over backwards onto the rocky ground, where he lay as still as the stones around him. It was a long time before Bayard stirred from that place.

Meanwhile, his opponent rode up the trail some distance, stopping where it narrowed and cut through a granite escarpment, where the stone that bordered the trail rose well above his shoulders. It was impossible to travel around the ogre as he sat on horseback, wedged into the pass like a boulder, Agion had moved to Bayard’s side at once, had knelt by him—not an easy thing to do for a centaur—and was treating him, trying to revive him with various strong-smelling herbs.

I, on the other hand, stood there. I watched the enormous creature sit on his horse like so much inert baggage. He did not move. He did not menace.

But I felt as though he was regarding me. And I had been regarded in that manner before. I heard Bayard sputter behind me, heard the armor rattle as he rose to his feet.

“What is that you waved under my nose, centaur?”

“Goldwort, designed to . . .”

“I know, I know, to steal the breath and kill the patient. Now if you’re done trying to poison me, perhaps you’d . . .”

It took Bayard a moment to remember where he was. He stopped suddenly and looked up the path, to where the ogre sat astride his horse, waiting like a huge metal barricade. I stood where I was, in no hurry to rejoin my companions. But as I watched Bayard stagger a little on the rocky incline, raise his sword in the Solamnic salute, motion to Agion to help him back onto Valorous, I felt something a little like shame. Shame for not lending a hand.

Not that I let that bother me for long. After all, a fellow could get killed up here among the ogres and centaurs. I crouched by a stump downhill from the conflict and awaited the outcome, all set to run if the conflict turned against my protector.

Mounted now, Bayard wheeled Valorous about, and shouted out a challenge to the monster who loomed over the path ahead of him.

“Who are you who so rudely stands between us and our peaceful way across these mountains?”

No answer.

Bayard continued. “If you have aught of peace or justice in your spirit, stand aside and let us pass without quarrel or conflict. But if it is quarrel and conflict you desire, rest assured you will receive it at the hand of Bayard Brightblade of the Vingaard Keep, Knight of the Sword and defender of the three Solamnic Orders.”

It sounded pretty, indeed, but the guardian of the pass stood where he stood, a darker form against the dark eastern sky.

Sword raised, Bayard charged at the ogre again.

This time it was over almost as quickly as it began. The creature flicked his net casually, entangling Bayard’s sword and sending it clattering into some rocks south of the pathway. Then, he brought the flat side of his trident thundering down on Bayard’s helmet, and again our champion toppled to the ground, where he lay still. The victor sat on his horse and watched as Agion galloped forward, lifted Sir Bayard in his arms, and carried him awkwardly back down the trail and out of immediate danger.

It was a brave move and a foolish one for the centaur, for who could say when that trident would descend with stabbing quickness?

Out of trident-reach, Agion passed me at a trot, and I turned to follow him, dragging a reluctant pack mare behind me.

A hundred yards or so from the waiting ogre, we settled in a small clearing of stones just off the road. Agion knelt again and passed the goldwort under Bayard’s nose once more.

This time it did not work.

“Is he . . .”

“Just battered senseless,” Agion assured me. “Sir Bayard is liable to be past recall for some time.” He looked up the trail ahead of us. “And it seems our adversary has vanished.”

I followed his glance. Indeed, the narrow pass was now clear of behemoths.

“Can you carry him, Agion? Maybe we can slip through there while Sir Largeness is away. Or maybe we can go back west, into Coastlund.”

The centaur shook his head.

“We are here, my little friend, for the duration. The Knight is injured. He cannot be moved safely. So until he wakes . . . we keep a fire, keep a vigil, keep a watch for ogres.”

I looked around us. It was scarcely a promising landscape. Bayard had-led us higher and higher into the Vingaard Mountains, past the tree line and into a forbidding, rocky country of gravel and ice and solid rock. Around us the world had fallen into a pensive, uncomfortable silence.

The next day was possibly the worst so far. Bayard did not respond to goldwort, to mimseng, or to switchweed. I know because Agion had me scouring the rocks for those herbs and for any others I could find. Once I had rooted around the clearing as far up the trail as my courage would take me, I returned to our campsite, where Agion knelt above a still unconscious Bayard.

“Did I ever tell thee what Megaera had to say about switchweed?” Agion asked.

“Look, Agion, I don’t think this is the time—”

“‘Good for what ails thee, Agion,’ she would say, ‘as long as thou’rt willing to wait a year for it to work.’”

He tossed the switchweed aside indifferently.

“Agion—”

“Thou must keep watch for the return of the mysterious ogre. Between the weather’s sudden turnings and the hidden properties of these foul-smelling plants, I have enough to worry about. As for me, I plan to make us comfortable for the night, for today the odds do not look good for Bayard’s waking and our departure.”

It looked even worse as the night approached. The air thinned and the temperature dropped even further. It was as though the season had suddenly changed to winter. The landscape around us was bathed in the bloody orange light of the setting sun, and our shadows grew taller and taller as the darkness rose out of the east in front of us. Soon our only light, our only heat, came from the meager flame Agion had managed to kindle from the sparse dried branches and leaves.

I drew my tooled leather gloves from my pocket—the expensive ones I had bought with the servants’ money and hidden all of our long, swamp-infested journey in order to avoid suspicion. It was too cold for me to care what anyone thought of my accessories.

“Don’t you think Sir Bayard is taking these games down in Solamnia too seriously?” I whispered to Agion.

“After all, it isn’t his life alone he’s risking on this harebrained jaunt through the mountains, though he has done a good job at risking that.”

“I know not,” Agion replied. “Is it not written so in his Code somewhere—that the tournament is life and death?”

“I grew up among Solamnics, Agion, and I trust I would have heard such foolishness had such foolishness been around. What’s life and death is this depth of winter we’re about to plumb. Look at him there.”

Bayard lay on a blanket beside us, bundled against the cold, descending wind. He showed no signs of waking, and it was twelve hours since he had moved.

“What wouldst thou have me do?” Agion snapped. “It is not the onset of death by cold, nor even the onset of frostbite. What thou sufferest is mere discomfort, Master Galen—the aches of a nobleman’s son who finds the fireplace ready when the frost first touches the ground. Th’art soft, Master Galen, and though ’tis not my place to tell thee such things, th’art in need of the telling.”

He turned to face me with a look of distaste he no doubt believed would make me repent on the spot.

“First and foremost, it is the cowardice that is most unseemly, most unbecoming for one in the service of a Knight such as Sir Bayard. But it is also the lesser things—the whines and the whimpers and the concerns with long odds and stormy weather. Th’art often a pain not worth the having, for if there’s a burr in thy saddle, thou’lt find it, and a pebble in thy pallet, so that thou hast me marveling at what thou wouldst say in the teeth of real danger, real discomfort. I have said too much.”

“At least in that you are right, centaur. You have said too much. Maybe I do whine and whimper about the weather, but look around you, Agion. It’s getting colder the higher we travel, and a big thick-witted centaur is going to be the last one to feel any real emergency in the temperature.

“But emergencies happen. We could run out of food in the highest reaches of this pass. You’ve heard the stories—how the travelers go through provisions, then through the horses, then through each other? Well, after the traveling food is gone, it’ll be the pack mare first, then Valorous—I’m sure we’ll go in order of familiarity. Guess who’ll be third, Agion? Folks wait until the last moment to eat something in their species—it’s just human nature, everything’s nature except maybe goblins.

“Remember who’s the odd one out here,” I whispered, closing my argument as menacingly as possible.

“Species loyalty is a powerful thing.”

So we sulked and refused to speak to one another. We traded off watches for the rest of the night, each sleeping fitfully when it wasn’t his turn.

Agion surely did, snoring so heavily that at times I woke suddenly at my post on watch, filled with the fear that I was about to be covered by an avalanche or a rockslide tumbling down upon us from some peak we hadn’t noticed.

All of this was silliness, was dream. But sleep was fitful because of the dreaming, as old fears rose from memory and imaginings to share my fireside and blanket. I dreamed of the Scorpion finding me, of Bayard finding out about the Scorpion, of Alfric rising from the mud of the swamp, knife in hand, and of Father on the road to meet us, clutching the order for my hanging tightly in his gloved hand. Some time very early in the morning—the night was at its absolute darkest—I started awake from my watch again.

Good luck was with me. I had nodded off, and still no dire thing had happened. I sighed and looked overhead, where the Book of Gilean wheeled faintly in the sky above me, covered fitfully by the clouds that passed rapidly by from east to west. It was hard to see beyond the light of the fire, hard to hear beyond the crackle of the blaze, the breathing of the horses, Agion’s snoring, and the dim cry of the wind. But somewhere off in the darkness to the south—in the direction of the pass—the wind lifted a sound toward me, making me sit up and listen again, this time to a distant silence, as the sound did not repeat itself. For an hour or so I sat there alert and silent, still listening. But from that point onward I heard only the snap of the pine branches in the fire and the rumble of the centaur, who slept untroubled by thought, I was sure, because he was so untroubled by any thought while he was awake.

What I had heard was the sound of voices passing. And for the life of me, they sounded like my brothers’ voices calling my brothers’ names.

When Agion replaced me on watch, for a moment I thought about following those voices. But where had they gone?

Who was to say that I had heard brothers on the wind and not some monstrosity?

Bayard awakened the next morning, babbling to someone about securing the keep, that “Vingaard is once more ours, Launfal.” He was a hundred miles away and a dozen years back, evidently, and it took us a while to explain to him where he was.

It took him awhile yet to recover. Sullenly he resolved to wait until the next day for us to travel, knowing that his wounds would not bear the journey on horseback.

When evening came, Bayard had recovered some. He relaxed and became almost pleasant. There was still no sign of the ogre, so he and I climbed an enormous, sloping array of rocks that peaked above the trail, leaving Valorous and the pack mare behind in the care of Agion. Bayard gestured toward the horizon.

“Perhaps they watched for dragons here back in the Age of Dreams, when there were dragons,” Bayard murmured.

“Who watched, Sir Bayard?”

“Dwarves. Maybe men. Maybe a race older than both, or one born from both and since forgotten. We know so little of the time in which these rocks were placed here.”

He looked at me reflectively.

“Indeed,” he concluded, “we know just enough of our past to get us in trouble.”

He was silent for some time. Below us and to the east, the faces of the mountains declined rapidly into foothills, then rolling hills, then plains I could see even from where we were standing—from great distance and in the growing dark.

This must have been the way this country looked at the time of which Bayard was speaking—back in the Age of Dreams, when men fought elves, when dwarves trusted nobody, when everyone looked out for dragons. Back then, perhaps, the trees grew more thickly in the altitudes, unhewn and unfired. Back then, even in autumn, there might have been more bird song.

As I reflected, a pinpoint of light flickered at the farthest east my eyesight could reach. It was followed by another, then another, and soon a whole patch of dark downward and eastward lay speckled and spangled with dim light. It looked as though you were looking down a well where someone—some mischievous boy, perhaps—had hidden vials of phosfire.

“Solamnia,” Bayard said softly behind me.

I turned to see him looking beyond me, smiling.

“What you see lighting the eastern horizon is a village in Solamnia. A pleasant little place, halfway between the end of this pass and the south fork of the Vingaard River. We should be there by tomorrow night, the gods willing. And from there the Castle di Caela is but two days away—a day and a night of hard riding if we travel with spirit and the horses are able.

“As for now,” he said and looked at me more directly, his gray eyes drooping with fatigue, “as for now, a rest well deserved. No matter my hopes of arriving on time to the tournament, I shall not risk the lives of my companions on rocky terrain in the blackness of night.”

“Master Bayard? Master Galen?” Agion called from below, for the first time a note of fear in his voice. He was afraid of the slippery rocks and sliding gravel beneath his large and clumsy hooves. Bayard walked to an overlook behind us, to where he was in sight of the centaur.

“Agion, make a fire. We shall be down shortly, and then all of us will sit and talk, and sleep when the need for sleep comes.”

The great pile of rocks stretched over the plateau for almost a hundred yards. Bayard knew the pass well, knew the plateau, too. If he had decided not to travel by night, we were crossing deceptive ground indeed. On the leeward side of the rock pile the air was calm and dried branches lay bundled and stacked in an orderly fashion, as though the travelers before us had looked out for our comfort, never knowing who we might be or how much time would pass before we followed their footsteps.

Agion scraped together the fire, using one bundle of the kindling. The horses saw the spark from the flint, smelled the pine smoke, and moved closer to us as the light began to rise from the dried branches. We sat, our backs to the warmth of the horses, our faces and our outstretched hands to the warmth of the fire. It was there that I heard the rest of Bayard’s story.

And understood that history was something like this notch in the road filled with abandoned bundles of kindling—that things are left within it to be picked up and used later, in ways that those who had left those things might never have dreamed.

Bayard was right about our past, that often it showed us only enough to get us in trouble.

“So there were Brightblades at the outset of this story of di Caelas,” I began when the warmth had settled on my skin and the hardtack—almost the last of the traveling food we had brought with us from the moat house—had settled in my stomach. “But what are the Brightblades doing in the story now?”

Bayard stirred the fire.

“What is the Brightblade doing. You see, Galen, I am the last of the line, and therein lies the end of the story.

“For the history of the Brightblades touches that of the di Caelas twice—at the beginning of the family and at its end. Indeed, it is a Brightblade who is supposed to lift the di Caela curse.

“Don’t tell me I’ve forgotten to mention the prophecy that ties our stories together,”

He gave me a look of innocent concern.

“Yes, Bayard, I am afraid you ‘forgot to mention’ it. After dragging me through some swamp that nearly swallowed me whole, then past some behemoth of an ogre that nearly chopped up all of us, then into the coldest weather I’ve ever seen, where even my extremities give up on me, I can understand why you might ‘forget to mention’ that there is a genuine reason for all of this, and that we are supposed to do something about this curse.”

“Calm yourself, Galen,” Bayard urged, rising from the fire and moving slowly toward me. “Hear the rest of my story.

“It is the beginning of the end for the line of Benedict di Caela, or for Benedict di Caela himself, if he is, as some legends claim, four hundred years old and forever returning. It is the beginning of the end for him, or he wins and wins finally.

“For I remembered the prophecy, word for word, the first time I saw it in the Great Library of Palanthas, when there was little to do except read and wait and hope to gain wisdom. I found the book by accident, as such things are often found. I turned to the third chapter at random and read it only idly at first, my interest maintained when the Brightblade name occurred in the text, and I skimmed hundreds of pages to find that name again. It was there at the end of the chapter, in a scrawl in the margin that obviously had bearing on me.

“Lots of verbal hocus pocus if you ask me,” I commented. We had listened in silence to the night wind outside our shelter as it whipped across the plateau. “The first part is pretty clear, and di Caela’s inheritance descends to a woman for the . . . first time?”

Bayard nodded. “In four hundred years.”

“What’s more, I must allow that ‘Bright Blade’ is doubtless no coincidence. But the last part is too gnarled and obscure and badly rhymed. Have you figured out any other way to read it?”

“Not for the life of me, Galen. Each time I read it, the meaning comes out the same. Which is, I allow, unusual for prophecy.”

The wind raised its voice, and Bayard moved closer to the fire, regarding me calmly over the wavering flame.

“It also seems to me that when one finds himself written into the chronicles to come, whether in Sath’s prophetic poems, or the History of Astinus of Palanthas, or a more humble work such as the one I found in the Great Library, when one knows he has a part to play in the unfolding of that history, one plays that part and trusts that his role, because he intends only good, will be for the good.”

“But, Master Bayard, what if, despite the goodness of heart and goodness of intention, your role is a disastrous one?” Agion asked, draping a cloak about my shoulders.

The centaur was turning into quite the philosopher.

“Or what if, sir, your role is a good one, yet you destroy two equally well-intentioned companions in the process of finding your place in history?”

Bayard rested his head against stacks of granite and limestone. He closed his eyes, and the wind sang its desolate song all around our campsite. Outside this circle of fire and stone, the night was fit for nothing. It was much like I pictured the landscape of the white moon Solinari, claimed by the myths to shed good influence over the planet, but cold and extreme and forbidding on its surface.

“Don’t you think I have considered these things?” Bayard asked finally, and like the wind over the plateau, a terrible, desolate look passed over his face. He seemed twice his thirty years for a moment, and it alarmed me.

“But after all,” he continued, and the pained look softened, “it does no good considering these things so long before they happen and,” he gestured about him, “in such a mournful place.

“Rest assured,” he said softly, urgently, “that I put you at risk for no personal gain, for no ambition of my own.”

Agion nodded and drew nearer the fire.

I was less convinced.

“What does Sir Robert di Caela make of all this business?”

“Sir Robert di Caela,” Bayard answered hesitantly, “may not know of this business, as you call it.”

“May not know of some prophecy affecting his family?”

“Some obscure prophecy, Galen,” Bayard corrected. “Made not even by a historian, but by someone writing in the margin of an old history—in a different hand and a different ink.”

“Whatever. You mean to tell me that you’re the only one familiar with this . . . this oracle, sir?”

“That may be. It was shelved deep in the Great Library. I came upon it by accident—or rather, not by accident, but by curious design, as I like to think. The manuscript was in a wavering, disordered hand that even the young sharp eyes I was blessed with at the time had trouble reading—I suspect it was the original, and that it had never been copied by the scribes. And yet the hand that wrote the prophecy was bold, flowing.”

“But I could write a book of prophecies, sir, and spin the future out of my most prized imaginings, or use these dice I wrestle with to predict a future you would say was a bogus one. Who’s to say your sage is a genuine seer? That he isn’t some mountebank selling trinkets, peddling at outrageous prices those oils he claims will restore eyesight if you place them on the ailing brow? But in fact the trinkets are glass, the oil is watered patchouli. And what’s in that book may belong on the same shelf of shabby wonders.”

Bayard nodded gravely.

“I’ve thought of that, Galen,” he maintained, knitting his eyebrows.

“All I have to say,” he continued, drawing his hands away from the fire, cupping them, and blowing into them, “is there is a coincidence that is not coincidence, that underlies everything we do that goes into making up history. It was chance that I should find the Book of Vinas Solamnus, but it was not blind chance. It was a chance that took place in a larger order I failed to recognize at the time.”

“Like the roll of two red dice,” I maintained flatly, and Bayard stared at me a long time, started to speak, then grew silent once again. The pack mare pawed the hard earth behind us and Valorous whickered, as though someone was laughing and dancing beyond the warmth of our fire.

“As for now,” Bayard concluded, wrapping himself in the blanket, his breath steaming though he stood only ten feet or so from the heart of the fire, “as for now, it’s best not to worry about such things. Best to sleep.”

The ogre returned as it neared midnight, as Bayard had predicted he would. The brute was no worse for the previous scuffle and, as far as I could see, was spoiling again for contact.

Bayard, on the other hand, was still in terrible shape. Nevertheless, he raised himself slowly—wearily, I thought—and gave his enormous opponent the time-honored Solamnic salute. Holding his sword in the right hand, his dagger in the left, he stood by the campfire, faced the dark hulk on the horse and folded his arms ceremoniously.

Well, the dark hulk moved not a whit in response. I doubted that was because the big fool had any reverence for Solamnic ceremony, or any reverence at all, for that matter. Instead, he was probably sitting there looking forward to the little armored fellow’s riding within the operating reach of his trident. Agion and I were after Bayard before he rode to meet the ogre, both trying to stop him from tangling with the whirlwind.

“You’re not obliged to fight this fellow, Sir Bayard,” I urged. “Let’s get him to chase us back up the trail and set a snare for him.”

It seemed reasonable, or so I thought. Bayard, on the other hand, tightened a cinch on his greaves, his back to me.

“But if thou contendest,” Agion added, “that our way must lie through this monster in our path, then remember it is our road—mine and Galen’s—too, not simply thine alone.” He stared at the ogre, sizing up the opposition. “And that the fight ahead is our fight as well as thine.”

“But I suppose that if we must go through with this,” I swiftly interjected, shooting Agion a look of pure and blistering hatred, “that I must urge you to remember your own words, that ‘this is a conflict between Knight and opponent.’ As much as Agion and I would like to help, we really can’t unless we kind of undo your principles altogether and as a result, make you kind of unworthy of Solamnic Knighthood.”

“Which is also why I cannot resort to trickery, Galen.”

“I understand, sir,” I equivocated.

This time things began differently. Valorous, remembering no doubt the encounter two nights ago, had passed beyond skittish to lathered and twitchy, evidently having his fill of unequal contests. Weary and sore though he seemed, Bayard calmed the big stallion with one pat of his gloved hand, then turned to us. The look I saw on his face was not that of a doomed man. Tired, yes, and no doubt a little afraid, but beneath the fatigue and the fear was a confidence I had not seen before, had not imagined.

“If I can hold him off a while, hold him off only this night, Galen, I shall defeat him,” Bayard whispered. “Of that I am certain.

“For surely there is a reason that he fights by night alone. I wager that it’s as simple a reason as those that run through the old legends: because he can’t fight by day, because the sunlight weakens him and vexes him. Things of darkness are often like this. Think of the ogre’s cousins, the goblins and the trolls, how they recoil at healthy sunlight.”

Bayard turned Valorous toward the battle, glanced back over his shoulder, and smiled as he shut the visor of the helmet.

“Playing the fox, boy! Playing the fox!” he shouted, as Valorous broke into a canter and, once again under a confident and sure hand, into a gallop, straight toward the dark, imposing figure of the ogre amidst the rocks, off on a dangerous gamble.

I scrambled to a small plateau by the roadside, where I had a vantage point from which to view the evening’s action.

As Bayard approached the mounted ogre, I glanced up at the clear and chilly autumn sky. The spiraling, infinite stars in the constellation of Mishakal, goddess of healing and knowledge, wheeled over me, and if I were a stargazer, such a sign would have given me courage.

Instead I cast the Calantina, there in the light of two moons, in the faintest glow from Agion’s fire a hundred feet away.

Sign of the Mongoose.

I knew of the Snake Dances in farthest Estwilde, where the mongoose is brought in to the last movement of the dance, where with nothing but quickness and brains and sharp teeth it goes up against the deadly ophidian to the music of pipe and drums. And I became a little more hopeful that Bayard’s version of events would somehow come to pass, that we were in a story where the sun would rise, the ogre would scream a withering, bloodcurdling scream, and vanish into smoke or melt away before our eyes.

By the time I had settled in to watch, Bayard had stopped some forty feet from the ogre—twenty feet or so out of the range of the net and the trident, where the rocks drew back from the side of the trail. Where there was room to maneuver.

Bayard stayed where he was on the trail—unmoving, staring down his enemy. The ogre responded in kind, a dark cloud rising as though out of the ground, covering his horse until it seemed that he was borne on the back of a thunder-head. So still were the two combatants that a rabbit hopped silently out of the rocks by the side of the road, stood poised on her haunches between them, and then hopped unhurriedly away, never aware that she had passed through a region that might at any time explode in swordplay and metal and blood. It was that still. When the rabbit had passed, when the trail lay in stillness awhile longer, there was suddenly the slightest of movements. But not from Bayard.

The ogre’s hand moved slowly on the trident. He shifted his gaze to regard Bayard more directly, and as he did, Bayard’s cloak fluttered out like a banner in an icy wind tearing itself from his shoulders and flapping off like a huge, ungainly bird down the trail behind him.

Still Bayard did not move. I thought he had become part of the landscape, that he had seen into the terrible eyes of the ogre and been turned to stone.

Slowly the trident raised, “proffered,” as the old Solamnic term went, pointed like a lance, its three nasty teeth aimed directly at Bayard’s heart.

Still Bayard did not move. Valorous twitched nervously, snorted, but the steadiness of Bayard’s hand calmed him.

Motionless they remained another long while. Agion joined me on the plateau and placed his hand on my shoulder. His strong grip kept me almost as stationary as the combatants we were watching. A raven lit on the ogre’s shoulder. For a minute he looked comical, like a huge, ungainly wizard in a painting. Then the raven ducked beneath its wing, raised its head alertly, and fluttered off. I had dark forebodings.

Then the fury was unleashed. Valorous broke into a charge, and ten feet at most from his waiting enemy, Bayard reined the big beast into a skidding, noisy turn toward the left side of the ogre. Who hadn’t been figuring on that. Who had raised his trident as he had before, like a club or a cudgel, ready to batter senseless whoever or whatever rode past him on his right side.

Before the big fellow could adjust, Bayard was on him, sword descending in a flashing blow that would have severed any limb short of a monster’s. But as Bayard moved to the attack, the ogre dropped the trident and tossed the net into his face, entangling the sword in its downward arc so that even though it sliced readily through the strands of the net, all that slicing slowed it some, until, by the time the blow reached the enemy, it was one he could deflect with his heavily plated forearm.

The sound of metal on metal was a new one, unlike the clang and clatter heard on tournament fields. Instead the ogre’s armor rang clearly, resonantly, like a huge tower bell, startling the birds overhead, making me wonder where I had heard that sound before.

The cloud beneath the ogre took on substance, once more resolving itself into horse and movement. The eyes of the horse glowed red. It shook its tangled black mane, and shivered.

At once the advantage swung once again to the enemy, for Bayard was tottering atop Valorous, half-netted and off balance, while the monster tried to reel him in, and at the same time reached for a dagger. It wasn’t good policy, what I did next, but I had to do it.

As the two of them tugged back and forth with the net, as Bayard leaned farther and farther forward in the saddle, moving inevitably toward the point where he would lose his balance and, soon afterward, his life, I sprang free of Agion, dislodged a hand-sized stone and winged it quickly at the ogre, who, his back to me, didn’t see me, the stone, or anything coming.

There was a time—and not too far back—when I’d been a pretty fair arm with a stone. I had held my own against rodent and dog, servant and brother. In short, a stone in my hand had summoned a healthy fear in each major species at the moat house.

Such times were over, evidently, for the rock flew harmlessly over the heads of the two struggling figures on horseback to clatter and bounce into the darkness behind them.

I picked up another stone. After all, I had nothing better to do, and by now Bayard was clinging to the saddle by horn and stirrup only.

Of course, I missed again. Rock throwing is largely a question of confidence, which now I had none of. And Bayard, struggling against a strength that it was easy to see would overwhelm him eventually, still managed to hold his own, to cling to the same spot on the saddle as the ogre backed his horse and tugged at the net. And growled.

The noise sounded as though it came echoing out of a depth of water somewhere, or as though a strange and terrible creature had taken a throat wound at the bottom of some well and was lying there, drowning in its own blood. The cry was distant, deep, and boiling.

Sheer terror does nothing for rock throwing. My third and fourth tosses both went wide, and I watched with growing dread as Bayard lost the little balance he had maintained, as gradually he leaned back toward the enemy, who was now poised, knife in hand, reeling my protector into stabbing range. Which would have happened shortly, had it not been for an accident. I connected with a stone’s throw at last. My seventh toss tumbled end over end like a dagger through the air, and found a resting place firmly on the rump of the ogre’s horse.

The outcome nearly killed both of them. Actually, the horses, too, because for a moment the ogre’s steed skipped backwards, whinnied, and reared, drawing the ropes of the net taut between its rider and Bayard. Luckily, Bayard was not too battered to think quickly and clearly. The taut ropes meant better cutting purchase, and he began at once, his broadsword slicing through four, five, six strands of net, giving him finally just enough elbow room and leverage to break free of the tangle. He reined in Valorous, who had slipped and staggered and nearly plunged headlong into the wall of granite that came up to the road. As though they were following an unspoken order, both combatants dismounted. Our enemy lumbered over to where he had discarded his trident, and picking up the weapon, turned to face Bayard with one of those alarming growls.

Meanwhile, Bayard had recovered balance and equal footing and room in which to maneuver. The first thrust of the trident he met skillfully, easily, deflecting it with a smooth downward stroke and a sideways step. The trident skidded harmlessly by him, striking granite and imbedding itself a good six inches in the solid stone before the ogre changed directions, removing the trident as casually as though it were a pitchfork in hay. Bayard danced about the enemy, who turned quickly and fiercely to follow his movement, like a badger at bay. I sat down on a rise of rocks above them. From this point on, I could hurl only insults, not stones. For they drew to close quarters, and given my aim and luck, I stood a great chance of hitting Bayard. So I sat down. In the moonlight I could see Agion bending watchfully nearby, the fire behind him. Overhead the two moons were rising, bathing the sheer rocks, the pine and ash and juniper, and the two adversaries in silver light and in red. The fighters circled one another. Occasionally one stumbled or backed into a rock wall, but they circled nonetheless, eyes intent and weapons at the ready.

It was setting up to be a long night indeed.

I must admit that even with Bayard’s life hanging in the balance, and mine most likely balanced there by his, after an hour of dancing and weaving and near-misses, the fight no longer held my interest. Twice Bayard had been cast to the ground; once he had lost his weapon. Under all circumstances he had managed to recover footing and arms, and once he managed to put the big fellow through some paces for, say, a minute or two. Finally, I reclined and resumed my watching of the sky. The night was quiet except for the sound of metal on metal, the cries and shouts and growls of the two in mortal combat. All in all, it was pretty clear how this one was going to end. Barring a sudden flash of luck on Bayard’s part, or barring the ogre’s doing something so overwhelmingly stupid that it would be talked about for generations hence, the fight would be over when the bigger one finally wore down the smaller.

Unless, of course, Bayard was right about the sunlight.

Nonetheless, it would be a night of fending, of delay.

Until the morning, I could do nothing but wait.

Now, maybe the ogre had every good reason to be absent the night before. Maybe he was elsewhere bullying something; perhaps he had to hunt for food or had other passes to guard, which he did in the daytime; perhaps he had been answering the call of nature, which, in a full suit of plate armor, is a procedure that can take almost forever.

At any rate, it turned out his absence had nothing to do with sunlight, or so we found when the sun rose and he cheerfully tossed Bayard several times against the granite cliffs by the side of the trail. So much for the prophecies of Knights, for stars and dice.

“B-but . . .” Bayard started to argue, to tell the big fellow that he was supposed to burst into flames or fall into dust. Another hoist and toss cut short the argument. Bayard rattled down the side of the cliffs, the ogre after him, trident raised.

It was now that Agion stepped into the battle. The big centaur had been restraining himself with some difficulty since the sun had risen and it had become increasingly clear that Bayard’s fairy tale solution to this problem was a fairy tale indeed. The ogre’s strength was, if anything, greater, and Bayard was faltering. Now, with my protector rolling helplessly in his armor like a capsized turtle and the ogre poised above him, Agion charged toward the two of them, his large hooves skittering dangerously on the loose rocks underfoot. He waved his club overhead, and his ragged hair fluttered like scarves in the wind. The ogre started, as if he had been aroused from sleep. Quickly he turned to face the centaur, who was closing the gap rapidly between the two of them with a strange and dreamlike speed. Bayard scrambled to his feet, tottered a moment in the heavy armor, and reached to the ground for his sword. Now the ogre turned on Bayard with a swift and powerful swipe of the trident. My protector ducked, and it was a good thing. The tines of the trident whistled a deadly music as they slashed through the air over his head. Agion stormed into the ogre. The collision shook the rocks around us, and the two enormous creatures slid over the graveled trail in a chaos of arms and legs and weaponry. Bayard rushed toward them, sword raised. The ogre pushed Agion away and scrambled on hands and knees toward the trident, reaching it just as Bayard bent to help Agion to his feet. With a deep dry shout, the monster hurled the weapon at the Knight. Who was not watching.

I shouted a warning, but it was too late. Bayard looked up from the rising centaur and saw the weapon hurtling at him. There was no time to think, to dodge. The Knight stood dumbstruck. To this day I wonder how Agion moved so quickly, so gracefully, in that terrible and slow quiet that seems to descend when something awful is about to happen. Faster than my eye could follow, the centaur stood, standing between Bayard and the flying weapon.

By the gods, the tines went deep. All three of them pierced that large and foolish chest, sank quickly. Stilling that large and simple heart.

Agion struck the ground with the sound of gravel tumbling, of breath surrendered. It was the ogre’s turn to be taken aback. Even from a distance I could see his eyes glaze over again. Now the beast looked around stupidly, as though he had forgotten where he was, and he was still looking about when a furious Bayard closed with him. One swift slash of the sword brought silence, the crackle of the ogre’s head falling among branches and the snap of more branches as Bayard knelt by Agion in silence. I rushed to my protector’s side.

Then, tangled by its matted hair amid the branches, the ogre’s head began to speak. Speaking with a deep mellifluous voice that by this time I should have expected, for was it not the Scorpion?

I could not look at the severed head, but not for fear and disgust. I could not take my eyes from Agion. But I could hear the thing speaking. Oh, yes, I could hear it, as it raced through past and present and things to come with a coldness and menace and lifelessness that hurtled to the heart of me like a trident. I remember what it said, to the very word.

“I shall take leave of you now, Bayard Brightblade. And may you find the road . . . as clear as you would like into the heartland of Solamnia. May there be safe traveling and bird song to accompany you.

“For I have done my part. The deeds on this day have assured that you will not attend the tournament at Castle di Caela.”

“We still have time!” Bayard protested, taking one uncertain step toward the speaking head.

“Perhaps. If you leave your big friend to the raptori. To the vultures and the kites. But the tournament will soon be over. Sir Robert di Caela will have an heir, the Lady Enid a husband. And it is all my doing, for my power ranges far. Blame not the satyrs in the swamp, though their trivial menace slowed you for a night or so; not your traitorous squire, who is no real master of delay . . .”

I could not look up.

“Nor, Sir Bayard, this very ogre, from whose long-dead lips I prophesy and bode. Indeed, if there is a villain, call it your lack of resolution, your passion for delay. Call it what you will. But remember: I am that delay.”

Bayard lunged at the gloating thing in the branches. With a deft swipe of his foot, he sent the head tumbling into the undergrowth off of the trail.

I looked back at Agion. Who seemed even younger than he had before. Why, in the way centaurs reckon things, he was no older than I.

I looked up into Bayard’s eyes.

Where indeed there was nothing but pain. A pain past anger, past tears.

“‘Your traitorous squire’?” he asked. Then he knelt by Agion.

For an hour he knelt in silence, oblivious to my summons. Once, when I tried to grab his arm, to shake him out of whatever stupor he had fallen into, he shrugged my hand away as though I had set a scorpion on his shoulder.

Not twenty feet from us, the head of the ogre steamed and stained the ground on which it lay.

After his hour of silence, Bayard arose and turned to Agion.

“I am sorry, Agion. I am dreadfully sorry. Tomorrow I shall continue to Castle di Caela, and when we get there I shall do what I have to do. Then I shall return to the Coastlund Swamp, there to answer Archala and the elders as best I can. But I am going to sleep now for a while. Keep watch while I do, good centaur, if you will. Keep watch this last time.”

Then turning to me, he stared above my head as though he were watching for stars (even though it was not yet midday), as though I sat huddled on the cold steps of some building far from this time and far from this country.

“Do what you will, Weasel,” he said. “I have nothing to say to you. No need of you.”

Chapter Twelve

The next day, we broke camp and, taking the ogre’s horse along, joined the narrow trail of the pass once more, beginning our descent of the mountains through a steep, embanked region where the plants had frozen the night before. The dead branches glittered with ice and with the ascending sunlight. Bayard rode ahead, lost in thought.

No matter how beautiful the branches, they were still dead. And images of death and of loss were quick to the eye this morning, for all the previous day and night had been taken up with the long sad rite of Agion’s makeshift funeral.

It was an awkward time after Bayard had rested. For tearfully we cleaned the centaur’s body, and tearfully we searched for a place of burial. But we were in the mountains, and the ground was rocky—too hard for digging.

We were forced to let Agion lie in the spot where he had fallen—where he had taken the sharp blade intended for Sir Bayard. We stacked stones upon the still form of our companion, forming by sundown a rough cairn of sorts above the body.

Bayard stood above our handiwork, his tunic and long hair dusty. My hands and shoulders ached from the carrying and the lifting. An owl piped from somewhere amid the concealing thick branches of a nearby cedar.

“This, too, is awkward,” Bayard said reflectively.

“Sir?”

“I know nothing of the centaur way in this matter,” he continued, speaking softly as though I were not there.

“There is, however, the way of the Order. And though he was no Solamnic, I do not see why these words cannot apply, cannot . . . enlarge to contain him.”

Strangely the night birds grew still as Bayard stood beside the mound of stones, chanting the ancient prayer:

As we descended into the foothills, the weather grew warmer and warmer, the temperature rising from numbing cold to what you might call “crisp.” Eventually we found ourselves in country that resembled nothing so much as early autumn. The glazed branches gave way to living things, as the trail wound itself through vallenwoods, pear trees, and maples, the leaves of which were turning reds and yellows and oranges against the bright blue of the Solamnic sky.

We were in Solamnia proper, home of the legends. Almost every story I had heard at my father’s knee had its beginning and usually its ending in this historic country.

But it seemed that on this side of the mountains, Bayard’s mood was even more restless. You could see that Castle di Caela could not be near enough for his liking. He hastened. For the first time he took the spurs to Valorous, and the big stallion kicked, snorted, then did what his rider wished. It was a pace I found uncomfortable, but after four hours or so it had really started to tell on the horses, who, don’t forget, were doing the running. It wasn’t but an hour or two until the pack mare began to sweat and lather and snort and smell bad, and by the time we had reached land that was altogether level, I was having visions of the mare falling over in midstride, her heart having given out. Bayard would go on alone. Bayard showed no signs of mercy or of exhaustion. In fact, he no longer seemed affected by any of the hardships of the journey. That morning and that afternoon he urged on a flagging Valorous, moving through ragged countryside as though we were cavalry—or worse, scouts for a band of nomadic raiders. The occasional farmer or traveler we saw shied away from us, no doubt thinking, True, there are only two of them, but judging from their faces, they’re the advance party for a terrible bunch of freebooters. We went on like this into the night, when our relentless passage ceased, and Bayard, alighting from Valorous as though he were rushing also to rest, said simply, “Here.”

Then he tied the reins to the low fork of an apple tree and, leaning against the trunk, fell into a sudden and deep sleep.

I sat up on my blanket. For a moment I thought I was back at the moat house, subject to some punishment, but my thoughts cleared and the surroundings tumbled back into place—the rolling Solamnic countryside, the stars of Gilean the Book glittering directly overhead, a huge armed man standing beside my blanket, saying something unclear at first, but then . . .

“. . . until we get to Castle di Caela. From there you may find a dozen paths home, Galen. If not Knights returning from the tournament, then certainly merchants or bards or pilgrims will pass by on their way to the West—to Coastlund or to Ergoth through the Westgate Pass—and they’ll not mind an extra hand with the horses until you’re back to your father’s house.

“But as for me, I owe your father the courtesy of seeing to it that you’re not lost or waylaid in Solamnia. Nonetheless, be ready and mounted at once, or I leave without you.”

Bayard was always threatening, but after the events in the mountains, I had no confidence that he was bluffing any more. Gasping in the chill night air—the air that feels all the colder when you first awaken—I wrapped my blanket about myself, then grabbed onto the mare’s mane for dear and desperate life as we galloped off after the galloping Sir Bayard, who was just underway in the dark ahead of us. It was three days more to Castle di Caela.

In the early hours of the morning, we galloped like apparitions through the small town we had seen from the overlook in the Vingaard mountains—the town in which Bayard had promised we would rest. Side by side, we rushed between dark thatched houses, only a banked lamp or two in the windows to guide us through the sleeping streets, those lights the only signs at this hour that the town was not abandoned entirely. Aside from the brusque awakenings, a shouted command or two, Bayard refused to speak to me, ignoring every question or statement I made, looking beyond me or even through me as though I were invisible. I felt like the puppeteers of Goodlund, designers and performers of the kender puppet shows, who stand on the stage with their wooden creations, move them, and supply their voices. By tradition, the audience has ignored these artists for so long, paying attention only to their puppets, that many outsiders wonder if the kender see the puppeteers at all.

Yes, things had changed between us. As the sky clouded and the rains began once more, Bayard mired himself in silence. He looked at the road ahead of him only. And no doubt he brooded over the comments the ogre let drop.

The sameness of things those days on the road—the rolling hills, the silence, the gloominess of weather and of spirits—was so maddening that I was relieved and grateful, finally, to see a change in the landscape when we reached a rise in the road. Looking down into a valley sloping gently eastward, we saw Castle di Caela in front of us, the bright tents and pavilions of two dozen Knights pitched around it.

“Castle di Caela,” Bayard said offhandedly, and pointed down to the stronghold below us. “We are late, without a doubt.”

He should have been more impressed. Castle di Caela was no huge, imposing structure like, say, the High Clerist’s Tower scarcely a week to our north; yet it made the moat house of my boyhood look like a cottage. I pulled on the mare’s mane, urging her to stop for a moment, even though Bayard was well on his way into the valley.

Castle di Caela faced west. We could see the main entrance and the drawbridge from where we stood. Four small towers rose perfectly from the corners of a huge square bailey, and these towers varied in height. The farthest one from us was the tallest by far, a square structure looming high above the two conical towers in front of it.

The upkeep was remarkable. Merlons and crenels altered on the curtain walls like gapped but otherwise perfect teeth. The westward faces of the towers, lit as they were by the sun setting behind us, glistened with a reddening light that made the castle seem brown or rusty, but flawless nevertheless. I had never seen its like. I know I was a poor boy from the provinces, unaccustomed to solid architecture, but even though this place had stood for over a thousand years, it shone with the glint of newness as though, like the swamp we had left far behind us, it was constantly growing, constantly recovering from the damage of time and of weather.

“Something, isn’t it?” I whispered to nobody in particular. The pack mare twitched anxiously, shaking me in the saddle.

I thought of Agion and of how he would have recoiled at the architectural foolishness of the castle below us, then remembered the few cottages and farmhouses we had passed between the swamp and the western foothills of the mountains, and how our centaur friend would recoil at the little buildings, as though they were somehow a mistake the earth had made.

The castle seemed to blur in front of me. There was no time to think of Agion. Sir Bayard was getting too far ahead of me. With a sharp clicking of my tongue and a slap on her haunch, I prodded the mare into movement. She galloped down the rise with her rider clinging on desperately, and sooner than I could have imagined, we reached the plain in front of Castle di Caela and started to pass by some of the pavilions. Where Knights were striking camp.

The tournament was over, evidently.

Bayard was past the tents and the noisy encampments, almost to the gates of the castle before I caught up with him. He had stopped at the edge of the moat, shouted his name up to the sentinel on the battlements, and was waiting for the message to travel to the keep—no doubt to Sir Robert di Caela—and the huge gate to open and the drawbridge to descend. Rigid in the saddle, eyes fixed on the entrance to the castle, Bayard paid me no mind, even when I spoke to him.

“There is no chance, of course, that we will be offered a warm bath and a feather bed for the night, is there, Sir Bayard?”

From the moat’s edge, the castle was even more impressive, the walls rising thirty feet or more to the merlons overlooking the gate. Half a dozen archers, perhaps more, stood up there on the battlements and gazed idly down at us. They were not curious at all—Just another outlander Knight, they probably thought. Only this one is late.

Behind the archers, if you leaned back in the saddle and craned your neck almost to the point of snapping, you could see over the gate wall to the top of the tallest tower, there in the southeastern corner of the castle. Atop that tower fluttered a wide blue banner, clearly visible because it was held aloft by the north wind—the flag of the House of di Caela, red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field. It was all very rich, very blue-blooded and forbidding.

Nervously I looked to Bayard, who paid me no attention. Instead, he dismounted and rummaged through the blankets on Valorous’s back until he drew out a thing wrapped in linen, large enough that it surprised me I had not noticed it before.

Indeed, had I been half a squire, I not only would have noticed it but have taken pretty good care of it. It was a shield, naturally, that Bayard unwrapped there at the entrance to Castle di Caela. Not the one he had been using to absorb the battery of vanishing satyrs or mysterious ogres, but a shiny one, unscratched and unscathed, bearing the imprint of a red sword against the background of a burning yellow sun. The Shield of the Brightblades.

As blue bloods met blue bloods.

The gates were thrown open for us, and Robert di Caela himself came down from the keep to greet us, all polite smiles and elegance. He was one of those men whose hair turns gray or even white in his twenties, who retains those youthful features under plumage that should belong to a man twice his age, and as a result looks even younger in the bargain than he actually is. And within the young face hung a white moustache neatly trimmed over a highbred nose, as handsome and as curved as a hawk’s bill.

His eyes were green as the ocean offshore. This was no man to wrestle hunting dogs in his great hall. It was good blood, good breeding, a bone structure to be envied. I began to hold out hopes for Enid. Indeed, I began to hold out hopes for Bayard—that something had happened in the lists or in the musings of this important, elegant man that had left Bayard the swain of the moment, Enid di Caela’s suitor of choice. That Bayard, according to his prophecy, would tie his family name to that of the di Caelas. Or so I was hoping.

Until Robert di Caela spoke.

“Brightblade, you say? Ah, there was a time I feared that name had died out—in your youth it would have been, when the peasantry seized Vingaard Keep. Yes, the name figures mightily in our past history. Perhaps it might have figured mightily in our present . . . had you come in time.”

“The tournament . . .” Bayard began, questioningly.

“Is over,” Sir Robert stated flatly. “And my daughter is betrothed.”

Bayard’s face reddened.

“Betrothed . . .” Sir Robert continued, with a hint of coldness and of trepidation in his voice, “to Gabriel Androctus, Solamnic Knight of the Sword.”

I could not tell if that coldness and trepidation had been saved for Sir Bayard, or whether they now belonged exclusively to this Androctus fellow. But I could tell that Sir Robert di Caela, despite his courtesy, was not reveling in the choice of son-in-law.

“No, Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard,” Sir Robert continued, this time even more coldly, “there were stories afoot that you would be here—indeed, that you might even have been favored to win in the lists. My old companion Sir Ramiro of the Maw was prepared to wager a substantial amount of money on your lance.”

“I know Ramiro well,” Bayard replied modestly. “He has a penchant for the long odds.”

“Made even longer when the party in question fails to show!” Sir Robert snapped. Then he governed himself, smiled, gestured toward one of the doors to the keep. “The young man chosen by lance, though a bit rough around the edges, seems of impeccable breeding and singularly gifted with the lance.”

Sir Robert looked pointedly at Bayard, who dwindled on each step across the courtyard. When we reached the door to the keep, Bayard seized the chance to leave Sir Robert and Castle di Caela gracefully.

“It is far from me to belittle hospitality, especially that of such a noble and gracious house,” he began, gaining his confidence and balance as he spoke, “but my horses are tired. So also must be my squire.”

That he added almost as an afterthought.

“With these duties in mind, I must beg leave of you until tomorrow. With your permission, I shall travel outside the walls and set up my pavilion among the other Knights.”

The first problem with all this courteous withdrawal was that we had no pavilion to set up—not even a tent to pitch. But Bayard wasn’t thinking of lodging; instead, he was all fired up to get beyond these walls, where, I could tell, we would shiver about a campfire until the early hours of the morning, when we would leave quietly, in the company of some of the other departing Knights. In only a moment’s conversation with Robert di Caela, it had become evident that the great doubt in Bayard’s thoughts had come to blossom: that the handwritten prophecy in the margin of the Book of Vinos Solamnus was at best a fanciful scrawling, at worst a cruel joke. Bayard was beaten. Instead of embarrassing himself and the name of Brightblade any further, he intended to beat a quick retreat to the swamp in Coastlund, bearing the news of our comrade’s death and fulfilling his promise to Agion by undergoing centaur trial.

“I respect the decision of my liege lord and protector, Sir Robert, but if it please Your Grace, I should like to stay in the Castle di Caela this evening.”

Bayard and Sir Robert gaped at me.

We stood at the big mahogany doorway to the keep—as tall as two men and five times as heavy—and it was as though that door had fallen suddenly onto the four of us.

“Certainly, young man, you are welcome to the hospitality of this castle . . .” Sir Robert began. I could sense the big “however” approaching in that sentence, so I leaped in quickly.

“Then I shall accept your kind offer, sire.” I turned to walk to the horses and retrieve my belongings from atop the pack mare, knowing that both Knights were far too much the gentlemen to make a decision in my absence as to where I would stay.

That’s the best thing about good old-fashioned Solamnic courtesy: you can rely on the people you’re taking advantage of to be basically more decent than you. Walking back toward the horses at the main gate in the curtain wall, I could relax, could take my first chance to look around me, knowing that no plots were hatching while Galen was away.

Castle di Caela was less a castle than a city within walls, or at least it seemed so to my eyes at the time. Thatched huts and lean-tos lined the inside of the gate wall. They seemed to be either homes or places of business for peasants and farmers who were there to peddle wares, to argue among themselves, to offer me chickens.

Once inside the castle gates, our horses had seemed more at ease, their only anxiousness that of hunger. While one of the farmers had turned to curse another, I dipped several radishes out of the basket at the front of his stall and offered them to the pack mare. She ate serenely, snorting briefly at the first spicy taste of the plant but then chewing loudly and delightedly, her big brown eyes half-closed in bliss. I watched the pack mare chew, carefully drawing my bag of belongings out of the clutter piled atop her saddle. It was times like this that you wanted to be a horse or mule, free of memories of the past and worries about the future and most of all the politics of the present. Let my only concern be where the next radish was coming from, and I’d carry a hundred pounds of armor gladly.

I looked over my shoulder, careful to put my hands behind my back in case the pack mare were to confuse my fingers with further radishes.

At the keep door Sir Robert and Bayard continued to talk—calmly for all I could tell, although I could see, even from this distance, that Bayard was still red from his squire’s disobedience. Be that as it might, I figured I was his squire no longer.

Which did not mean I had left his service.

For there is nothing that turns a boy’s thoughts inward more completely than a long ride in silent company. Especially when he knows the thoughts of his companion, and knows that they are not friendly ones. Had all the rolling lands of Solamnia lay between the foot of the Vingaard Mountains and the gates of Castle di Caela, it would not have been enough traveling, enough time, to outrun the thoughts of that narrow pass, of the gloating head of the ogre.

Of our fallen friend and his humble cairn of stones.

What I had cost Agion I didn’t see how I could return.

But I owed Bayard some serious penance. I intended to get to work on that, and far better to work from somewhere in this castle, where his hopes for power and matrimony lay shaken, than out of some solemn campsite. Far better to tunnel than to sulk.

After all, they did call me Weasel.

If all else failed, I could burrow into Robert di Caela’s affections. In the days to come I would flatter the old man, cast admiration on his every word and action. I would even marvel at his gestures. Enid I would treat as my dear older sister, regardless of how stern and blocky she might be, and I would learn at Sir Robert’s hand the management of the estate while this newfound sister was off in the barrens of wherever becoming disenchanted with Gabriel Androctus. I would fill Sir Robert’s empty nest, and by the time a question of inheritance arose (which would be years, judging from the strength and apparent health of the di Caelas), I might well have flattered and groveled enough before him that I might be heard in the halls where wills are drawn up. I liked the size and shape and luxury of Castle di Caela. I hoped devoutly to stay awhile. But first things first. In all this many-windowed splendor there had to be a prospect for Bayard. As Bayard went to the gate and out into the countryside surrounding the castle, where he would spend the night on the ground surrounded by horses while I pitched camp in fresh bedding surrounded by silk, by a fireplace I prayed, he glared at me with such a look of disbelief and defeat and betrayal that for a moment I was angry, outraged that despite the Scorpion and his thefts and lies and misdeeds, Bayard thought I was the real weasel in the henhouse.

Then the smell of roast beef reached me from somewhere in the warm recesses of the castle keep. I followed Sir Robert through the huge mahogany door, into a well lit room of polished marble, filled with buffed armor and dark paintings.

It was the kind of lodging I was born for, I decided.

“I heard the name ‘Galen’ in my exchange with Sir Bayard,” Sir Robert began, draping his magnificent blue cloak over a nearby chair. “Is the family name one I would recognize, or are you . . .” and he smiled without any irony I could see, “. . . from a faraway place where I might not know the names?”

“I’m a Pathwarden myself, sir,” I said.

“I see,” Sir Robert replied, and said nothing else, as he lit a candle resting on a mahogany table in the hall and beckoned to me to follow him.

We passed through the anteroom of the family di Caela. I knew the Brightblades had some sort of historical importance—and I was hoping devoutly that Sir Robert wasn’t going to ask me to refresh his memory on my family history—but somehow both names paled in the glamor and traditions housed by this building. I was walking in a shrine of sorts—I knew Father and Gileandos would both be impressed. For this was the seat of a great family, one who fought side by side with Vinas Solamnus. Who could trace their ancestry back a millennium. And the man who walked in front of me, holding a candle, was the heir to all this—not only the wealth, mind you, but the history and the heroism and the nobility. It was enough to impress the hardest head in Solamnia.

Sir Robert guided me past several paintings—ancient oils of his di Caela ancestors. I looked out of the corner of my eye for a portrait that might be Benedict’s. The eyes of one portrait—that of a handsome old man with a livid scar on his left cheek—seemed to follow me as I moved down the hall. I thought of the childhood stories of haunted galleries, of things behind the walls who watched passers-by through ides in the portraits. With my eyes on the painting, my thoughts on the likelihood of spooks in the woodwork, I didn’t notice that Sir Robert had stopped until I walked into him.

“A Pathwarden, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Son of Sir Andrew Pathwarden?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I had been told . . .”

“Sir?”

“. . . that Sir Andrew has but two sons,” Sir Robert mused, tilting his head and, taking me by the shoulder, moving me beneath a sconce on the wall—no doubt so he could get a better look.

“I am often forgotten when sons are tallied at our moat house,” I replied quickly, desperately, staring wide-eyed at the sconce above me, filling my eyes with the tear-jerking heat and smoke of the torch. For some reason, my throat burned without aid of torch or smoke. And easily I burst into false sobs after the fire had stirred up the tears.

“My brothers keep me in the mews, Sir Robert. With the hunting birds!” I sniffed. His grip on my shoulder softened.

“If that’s so, they’ll answer for it soon, lad,” he declared—a puzzling statement, to be sure. I looked at him curiously. He turned away, addressed me awkwardly.

“Now compose yourself, Galen. You’re too big for tears.”

As we passed beneath an arch into another room and approached a wide staircase, my eyes followed up the steps to a landing surrounded by a marble railing and statues of hawks and of unicorns. Intricate metal cuckoos perched upon swings that hung from the ceiling of the keep, their moorings lost in darkness and in height. Suddenly a cuckoo whistled behind us. I turned to the source of the sound.

And saw a vision there on the landing, winding a metal bird.

Actually, it was a girl about my age, dressed in a simple white gown that a girl of almost any station—from princess to servant—might wear in comfort. It was obvious, however, that this one was unaccustomed to following orders of any kind. She walked the landing as if she owned it.

She had blond hair and fair skin, but even from where I stood I could tell that her eyes were dark, her cheekbones high like those of a Plainswoman. It made me wonder about her ancestry from the first, and I instantly believed she had gotten the best from both sides of her family.

The girl paid little attention to us, intent on fixing one of the cuckoos whose cuckoo had, evidently, ceased to function. With some tiny, glittering instrument, she inspected the head of the toy and made adjustments too small for me to see at the distance from which I stood.

“Tell the servants to set another place at the dinner table, my dear,” Sir Robert called up to the girl on the landing. “We have a guest.”

“You tell them,” the girl called down, attention still fixed on her business. “You’re heading in that direction.”

Sir Robert reddened for a moment, clenching his fists. Then he laughed, shook his head, and continued walking. I doubled my steps, walked alongside him.

“Your wife, sire?”

“My obedient daughter, Enid di Caela,” Sir Robert chuckled, as we walked up a small flight of stairs toward another mahogany doorway.

Enid? The pastry-baking, hefty Enid of my imaginings? Bayard had good reason to be downcast!

“Enid di Caela,” Sir Robert repeated, this time more quietly, less merrily. “Soon to be Enid Androctus.

“Ah, and here is one of your brothers!”

It took a moment for Sir Robert’s last statement to sink in. I was still wrestling with the idea that the Enid of fact far surpassed the Enid of my imaginings, still entangled in the blond hair, drowned in the dark eyes, as the poets might say. But when Alfric appeared from an archway ahead of us, it was all I could do to keep from turning and taking flight through the paneled and cuckooing hallways.

Chapter Thirteen

My brother was disturbingly untroubled, almost serene, when he met me in the long corridor of Castle di Caela, though I expect it puzzled Sir Robert that two long-lost brothers did not rush into a warm, fraternal embrace.

While Sir Robert escorted us back to our assigned quarters, I began to entertain the hope that something on the road had transformed my brother, had left him a wiser and more forgiving man than when I had left him waist-deep in Warden Swamp. As Alfric kept conversation polite, even friendly, I decided there could be worse things than sharing his rooms for the evening.

When he sprang upon me as the door closed, fully intent on throttling me, it was all I could do to utter feeble protest.

“Please, Brother! P-please! You’re killing me!”

This loud enough, I hoped devoutly, to call Sir Robert back. But no footsteps returned to the door. And all the while Alfric’s death grip tightened.

“This is it, little brother. This time all the bluster and promises and crying wolf is over on account of I am going to kill you. Going to strangle you dead for leaving me back there mired in Warden Swamp.”

“But what will Sir Robert s—” My voice was pinched into hisses and whistles.

Alfric’s grip slackened.

“You’re right, Weasel. If I was to do you in it could cause great harm to my prospects here.

“Even though you are not the favorite folks around here at the moment—you and your high and mighty Sir Bayard Brightblade, that is—it would not do me to fall into something as un-Solamnic as killing a brother, now would it? Specially since you are no more a danger to me, and you no longer have got what I want.”

He told me what he had learned about the tournament—of the lists and the sorrows and the cold power of Sir Gabriel Androctus, and Sir Robert di Caela’s rising impatience as the days wore on and no Bayard Brightblade showed. He straddled me and reveled in our delays.

“I would expect that it’s only Solamnic courtesy what keeps him from tarring and feathering the both of you and rolling you back to the Vingaard Mountains in a barrel.”

“H-how did you ever manage to . . .”

“Beat you to the castle? Seems like everyone beat you and Bayard to the castle, don’t it?”

He placed his hands on his hips and laughed. Laughed until he was red-faced and the veins stood out in his neck, and I began to wonder if my brother did not have a few cats in his bell tower, as they say. I used the opportunity to slip out from under him and crawl under a table in the far corner of the room.

“Brithelm,” he declared, his laughter subsiding and his breath recovered. “Brithelm it was what pulled me out of the mire. And I explained to him that I needed to get to Castle di Caela. Told him about the tournament, I did, and that we’d have to rush to get there.

“So he’s off in a flash back to the moat house, and he returns in a few hours with two of Father’s best horses and a week’s provisions and we’re off for Castle di Caela. I didn’t think I’d have much of a chance in that tournament, but I thought I might get a chance to skin you in the bargain, or at least take your place as Bayard’s squire, seeing as nobody wants a squire who bogs down his own brother.

“Anyway, Brithelm not only knows to get the horses and provisions, but he knows this pass through the Vingaard Mountains way south of the Westgate. A pass he says is going to cut three days off our trip at least.

“You can imagine our surprise, Galen, when we seen you and Bayard and that horse-man . . .”

“Agion.”

“Whoever . . . run up against that ogre in the high reach of the pass. I watched it from a distance. Brithelm couldn’t see that far—part of his bumping into things is just bad eyesight, did you know? So I tell him Bayard was winning, and he believes me. Otherwise he’d of wanted to hike down and pitch in.

“So when I seen you folks had settled for the night, Brithelm and I passed by and made our way over the mountains.”

“Then it was your voice I heard that night at the campsite!”

“Seems to me it’s better to leave your brother on a mountain pass with two able companions than waist-deep and alone in the mire,” Alfric philosophized. “Think about that if you get too pious.”

I shrank back behind the table.

“You may have a chance for that squirehood now, Alfric. Because of some things that happened in the swamp and in the mountains, Bayard has no further use of me. Odds are he’ll be looking for a squire at once. You can find him at his encampment tonight.”

“It comes around, does it not, brother?” Alfric gloated, seating himself on the bed. “For I am no longer studying Bayard Brightblade. He was late. He is no longer the champion.”

“Meaning?”

“Gabriel Androctus is,” Alfric pronounced exultantly. “He won this tournament and the hand of the Lady Enid. He is about to become the most important Knight in this part of Solamnia.

“He that may be needing a new squire, and if he is, I plan to be that squire.”

Outside the door of my chambers, the halls of Castle di Caela trilled with mechanical cuckoos. I awoke from my nap. Alfric was still gone, no doubt preparing for the Feast of the Wedding Eve, the big dinner that precedes the nuptial ceremonies.

No doubt he was overdressing. No doubt trying for an audience with Gabriel Androctus—a chance to grovel and bootlick his way into squirehood.

Brithelm was somewhere in Castle di Caela, too, though no one was quite sure where. He had arrived shortly after the fateful meeting of Gabriel Androctus and Sir Prosper of Zeriak, and almost immediately wandered off—no doubt looking for some quiet spot in the castle where he could meditate. Which was all very well. I needed some time to regroup.

A good healthy sleep was unlikely in these chambers, what with the chirping and song and questioning calls of the little metal birds outside my door. Had it been only one bird and a less wealthy house, I could have marked the time until dinner by its calls, for cuckoos were just becoming fashionable then as a sort of mechanical timepiece.

Fashionable, but not reliable. As most of the birds were of gnomish make, most did not call out at the regular intervals the craftsmen promised. Instead, they would not call at all, call once and continuously until they wore out, or call at irregular times with the sound of metal scraping across metal so that the listener wished either time would stand still or he had never purchased the damn thing in the first place. The di Caelas, of course, were too old and wealthy a family to bother with keeping track of time. They lived in a mansion where past stood beside present, and nobody ever stated a preference for one or the other. What was more, they were so rich that if they had to be at any particular place at any particular time, the main event was held up until they got there. The birds were for decoration only, and for the pleasing sounds some di Caela thought they made, evidently.

Such sounds were not pleasing to this guest, however. The songs of the cuckoos disrupted my thoughts, which were disrupted to begin with by the questions I knew would sooner or later arise. Why had I abandoned Sir Bayard Brightblade, who less than a fortnight back had generously consented to take me on as his squire, despite profound misgivings on my father’s part?

Why was Sir Bayard late to the tournament in the first place, and what had I to do with any delays he might have encountered?

The longer I considered my situation, the more a return to Bayard seemed in order. I drew out the dice, cast the Calantina.

Sign of the Hart. Which had nothing to do with anything, as far as I could tell. Well, I was losing faith in the Calantina, anyway. I tried it again, hoping for a sign more to my understanding, more to my liking.

Sign of the Rat. Again. I remembered the last time I cast that, which was at the moat house. Well, so be it. I was leaving once more. Once again the Weasel was a Rat.

I stood, picked up my cloak from the bed, and walked to the entrance of the chamber. I set my ear to the door and listened. Outside, the hallway was fairly quiet, the cuckoos on this floor having apparently wound down or broken or made their noises for a while, gears grinding toward a time anywhere from ten minutes to three days from now, when like clockwork in a clock gone completely mad, they would sing once more. I opened the door slowly and stepped into the hallway. On tiptoe I passed the still sentinels of metal birds and headed down the hall toward the stairway, still clutching my cloak in my hands. The bird-lined hallway ended in an arch, which opened into a landing above the large room where Sir Robert had first mentioned his daughter’s impending marriage. I stood at the arch, looking down the stairway. It was on this landing that the Lady Enid had stood, had adjusted the birds. I bade the lady a silent farewell, hoping that someday in the great hall of the moat house, when the news came to Alfric that his younger brother had met an untimely death in a far-flung land, that the di Caelas—both the lovely Enid and her elegant father—would shed a sympathetic tear, perhaps wish they could have known this youngest Pathwarden, the irrepressible Galen, the mischievous but good-hearted Weasel.

I sniffled, having almost brought myself to tears with the pity of the scene I had imagined. I started down the stairs.

It was then that the bird to my right began to screech—loudly, painfully, as though someone were tearing it apart. Surprised, I spun about and tossed my cloak over the wailing mechanical thing, which continued to dance beneath the gray folds, its cry muffled but certainly not silenced. I looked behind me down the corridor toward my quarters, then once again down the stairs in front of me.

At the foot of which stood Enid, small hand on the banister, brown eyes regarding me with curiosity and amusement.

“Don’t pick at the devices, boy,” she said calmly. “You’ll make them sound worse.

“Though in the case of that one you just cloaked,” she continued, ascending the stairs, “it is very hard to imagine you doing anything that would damage the sound any more.”

She smelled of lilacs and lost time.

I found my voice, which had no doubt scurried halfway back up the hall. “That one does seem a little . . . harsh, Lady Enid. But the rest of them, if I might be so bold . . .”

“Are hideous,” she laughed, her merriment as musical as the sound of the covered cuckoo was discordant. “I do believe that had Mother lived, we would be happily free of these little tin outrages, no matter how much a part of di Caela family tradition they are. You cannot trust a man’s taste in sound or in color—for in both, loudness pleases them far too well.”

She passed by me on the steps and lifted my coat from the cuckoo in question, who continued with its grating, hysterical call. Reaching under the base of its perch, she tinkered with something, turned some toggle or switch, and the bird at last grew silent and still.

“Of course, you know all about family traditions, being of Solamnic stock and all,” the Lady Enid said, linking her arm in mine and escorting me past the stairwell in a wave of lilac and light. “Don’t you ever find this obsession with bloodline and ceremony just a little . . . tedious?”

I was speechless, this bright thing on my arm.

“I mean, every little gesture is part of some somber Solamnic tradition, the punishment for breaking which is really nothing more definite than losing face, which can be a dreadful thing, but certainly not as lethal as the Knights make it.”

She laughed that laugh of music once again, and I felt my face go warm.

“I beg your pardon, siir. Here I am forgetting that you’re in training for Knighthood, and probably all too concerned with such serious things.”

“Knighthood?” I stopped on the steps.

“Are you not Sir Bayard Brightblade’s squire?”

“Of-of course. Forgive me, Lady Enid. I was distracted by the beauties of this castle.”

And of the lady of the castle. So much so that I was forgetting myself, forgetting to ask where I was going, among other things. Where was she leading me?

“Attractive man, this Brightblade. I saw him approach from the windows of my chamber. A good swordsman, I’d wager.”

“One of the best,” I agreed. “If you fancy that kind of thing in a man.”

“Makes me wish I still had decisions, choices to make,” Enid said desolately, then brightened suddenly and overwhelmingly, nodding at one of the portraits hanging on the wall.

“Mariel di Caela. My great-great-aunt.”

“Lovely,” I responded automatically.

“It’s charming that the Order teaches boys politeness, Galen, but there is no need to parade it in these halls. Look at that face: an owl. A countenance only a troll could love.”

“Did you know her?”

“Dead when I was an infant. Six months before I was born she locked herself in the top of the southeast tower—the tallest one, windowless except for the rooms overlooking the curtain wall. Locked herself in with her pets—a dozen cats. Can you imagine the loose fur in the air? Grandfather was the di Caela then—the lord of this castle. He let her have her way. It’s a tradition that di Caela men make all decisions for their women—until they get old . . .”

She said that with some bitterness. I became more attentive.

“Then, of course, the men let them do whatever they want. Which by that time usually involves making life impossible for the men who have limited their options for years.

“At any rate, around the time I was born, Aunt Mariel began to refuse food. Being the domineering sort she was—remember, she was making up for half a century without being allowed a decision, half a century of following without question di Caela family tradition—she refused food for her animals as well. Of course, she was devoured by her cats.

“After a week of this fasting, the guards complained of Aunt Mariel’s silence. Complained that she no longer shouted instructions and commands underneath the huge door of the tower room.

“Led by Father, the guards tried the door. Led by Uncle Roderick—who died not long after this, but that’s another story entirely—they tried to pick the lock. Eventually, of course, they were forced to break down the door. The rest . . .” she smiled bleakly, “you can guess.”

“Was that part of the curse, too?”

Instantly, of course, I regretted what I had said. But Enid showed no surprise.

“Perhaps indirectly. I never thought of it. Of course, indirectly the curse gets blamed for just about everything that goes on here, Galen.”

She tilted her head and smiled curiously at me.

“You seem to know quite a bit about the di Caela curse. Especially considering you aren’t a di Caela.”

I was too struck by the smile to respond.

“Oh, never mind,” she said dismissively. “I suppose all the Solamnics get wind when old Benedict returns.”

“So it’s the same person every generation?”

“None of us has the foggiest idea. It sounds like a better curse if it is. But whether it’s old Benedict every time, or one of his descendants, or someone else entirely, this generation is supposed to be an important one. That’s why Father called the tournament. He wanted me married to a redoubtable Knight before the curse returned again.”

I nodded knowingly, having absolutely no clue as to how the curse really worked. Or how Sir Robert imagined it working.

We turned left down a hall running off the landing. The keep seemed larger and larger, almost a world in itself, the longer we walked.

As we walked, my thoughts cascaded.

“So it was this Gabriel Androctus who triumphed. Sir Gabriel Androctus, Knight of the Sword. A high-sounding title, but if you ask me, a Knight I find just a little bit wanting,” Enid continued. She pointed down another hallway to our right, lined with windows on one side, with full-sized marble statues on the other.

“The first six fathers of the family di Caela,” she announced.

“Which one is Benedict?”

“Benedict di Caela tried to destroy this family. He may still be trying. Why would we raise him a statue, silly boy?”

A door opened at the end of the hall, and another girl—about Enid’s age, I guessed—emerged and came up the hall towards us.

“Cousin Dannelle,” Enid called. “Come here and meet Galen Pathwarden, eminent squire.” The girl slowed her steps and squinted down the hall to catch a glimpse of me.

“He’s awfully small for an eminent squire,” Dannelle called out.

“But charming nonetheless,” Enid responded. “Come and look.”

I must admit I squirmed a little. I hate being fussed over, and I could see a fuss approaching. Dannelle glided down the hall—she had the di Caela family grace.

But not its looks.

Which is not to say she wasn’t beautiful, too. But instead of the blond hair, the brown eyes, the high cheekbones, her hair was red, her eyes green, her stature short and birdlike. She stared at me, and it felt as though I was looking into a mirror, only to see myself reflected as a lovely girl. In short, it was really disturbing.

“There is a crack in old Gerald’s pedestal, Enid,” Dannelle stated quietly, eyeing me. “This boy looks more Pathwarden than human.”

“Oh, Dannelle, stop it!” scolded Enid. “He can’t be held accountable for . . . Then both the girls laughed, and Enid put a hand on my shoulder, raising the heat and the blush I had felt on the stairs only a short while back.

“Dannelle isn’t all that fond of your eldest brother, though for the life of me I can’t figure why, seeing as he has her coloring and all,” Enid explained. Dannelle hooted in mock outrage, turned and made as though she were leaving us, walking back up the hall.

Enid called her back, and the two of them stared sullenly at one another for a moment or so before bursting into peals of laughter.

It was then I noticed the strongest family resemblance. Both laughs filled the long halls of the keep with warm and appealing music.

The three of us walked to the end of the hall of statues, lit by the afternoon sunlight. We turned right at Dannelle’s door, moving back toward the landing, I guessed. Along the way, each of the girls pointed out various relics of di Caela family history.

I learned about Denis di Caela, who had declared war against the rats in the cellar of the castle—an uphill work at its easiest in any castle, but in one this size (and at the time of the curse) impossible. I heard how, after ten years of losing battles, he had trapped a huge rat, then spent a year holding the animal hostage, thinking that the rats would surrender to regain the “freedom of their leader.”

Also of Simon di Caela, who thought he was an iguana, and spent his time basking in the sun on the roof of the low northeast tower, waiting for flies to alight. It was a sudden frost, the girls claimed merrily, that killed him.

Somehow, men such as these had held off the assaults of Benedict di Caela for over four hundred years. It was enough to give you courage, to give you confidence.

“What, if I might ask, Lady Enid, dampens your . . . enthusiasm for the bridegroom in question?”

“The prophecy, silly boy. The scrawled prophecy in the Book of Vinas Solamnus,” Enid said flatly.

“Then you do know of the prophecy?”

“Of course,” she replied. “Uncle Roderick made a special trip to Palanthas when a librarian found it in the margin of the text. It’s foolishness, no doubt, but when each generation suffers some mishap, the family looks into all possibilities.

“This one says something about a ‘Bright Blade,’ you know,” she continued, directing us left up another hall, then right down another, one wall of which was covered with a mural depicting the fall of Ergoth, the other blank except for a door the girls claimed led to a balcony that overlooked the dining hall. “And Father pounced upon that prophecy, taking it as a sign that we should marry into the Brightblades.”

“Of course, the text of the prophecy doesn’t really say that,” Dannelle added. “You could read it several ways—something about ‘the Bright Blade lifting the curse’, or some such obscurity Uncle Robert took to mean Enid had to marry one of them.

“That was the reason for the tournament. Uncle Robert figured that if there was a tournament to be had, Bayard Brightblade would figure into the arrangements. It was a way to draw him here, among other things.”

“Which did not work, of course,” Enid sighed, picking up the story. “Where was Sir Bayard—lost in the woods?”

If possible, I blushed even more deeply. Enid went on carelessly.

“Though I’ve seen him only once, he stands up well in comparison to this . . . Androctus.

“Whom I am obliged to marry.”

“But—” I began, and Dannelle interrupted.

“Uncle Robert claims that it’s nothing for Enid to worry over, that marriage to this Androctus—to any Knight, for that matter—will not change her life in any measurable way. He claims that anyone who marries a di Caela becomes a di Caela, actually, and that she can stay here in the castle and live pretty much as before.”

“Isn’t there some kind of gnome proverb,” I asked, “that goes ‘if you want to find out about someone, marry him into your family’?”

Both the girls laughed sadly and nodded.

“Whatever Gabriel Androctus is like,” Enid declared, “marrying him will be the last time I do anything which is not absolutely what I want to do.”

Which did not bode well for the champion’s marital bliss.

But I drew no joy from that.

There had to be a way that Bayard was right! Enid’s husband was supposed to be a Brightblade, not some outlander tricked up like a jackleg executioner.

The di Caela cousins continued to charm me and lead me around the second floor of the keep. Fattening me with beauty and attention until, inevitably, they would have to bring me to the slaughter in the dining room, where Sir Robert would start asking the questions I dreaded and uncover the details of my recent criminal fortnight as Bayard’s squire.

I slowed my steps, stifled a phony yawn.

“Please don’t take that yawn as a lack of interest, ladies. I find this business of di Caelas and Brightblades fascinating, but I fear that . . .”

I paused, relying on politeness and good breeding. In which I was not disappointed.

“Cousin Dannelle, here we are transporting the boy about the premises when he’d much rather rest before dinner!”

Enid exclaimed.

“It’s most rude of us, Cousin Enid! What must he think of the hospitality in Castle di Caela now?”

Dannelle reached out and straightened my hair. Again I warmed, reddened.

“Oh, I think no less of your hospitality, Lady Dannelle. But I am tired. If you would be so kind as to escort me back to my chambers where I might enjoy an hour’s nap before dining, I should be terribly grateful.”

Which they did without delay, fussing and apologizing as they went. With all the attention lavished upon me, it was all I could do to mark our path from hall to hall, past mural and statue and painting and stairway until, when we reached the doorway that was indeed my own, I still wasn’t quite sure if I had mastered the maze of the keep or not.

I sat alone in my room for a while, casting the red dice once and receiving the Sign of the Sea Horse. I cursed myself for having read only three of Gileandos’s commentaries on the Calantina, having left the volume on water signs “for later” because I didn’t recognize the animals it contained. Dice or no dice, once the footsteps had faded into the sound of cuckoos outside my door, once I had stepped into the hall again and looked first left, then right, seeing no beautiful Enid, no beautiful cousin, my curiosity led me back along my path of the last hour.

For I wanted to steal a look at Sir Gabriel Androctus.

It was an easy path to retrace. Past the paintings, past the enormous marble stairwell, left down the first hall off the landing, then turning right, down the hall lined with statuary. I heard someone calling for me in the recesses of the building behind me. I stopped and looked out the windows over the courtyard and the castle walls, into the western fields. There, at a distance, I recognized the yellow sun of Bayard’s pennant waving among those of several other Knights.

Where at least he had found shelter for the night.

I tiptoed past the marble di Caelas, who stared at me blankly, disapprovingly. Sure enough, old Gerald’s foundation was cracked.

Judging from Denis and Simon, and lately Mariel, it ran in the family.

Then I crept past Dannelle’s door.

I moved down the hall to the right, then left, then right again until I faced the hallway where, to my right, the siege of Ergoth raged silently and motionlessly, forever in paint upon the wall. The door opposite the mural opened into a rich and warm darkness, into the smell of expensive cloth underscored with the slightest odor of decay. Somewhere beyond the darkness I could hear noise—conversation, laughter, the clatter of metal and crockery. Cautiously I stepped toward the noise until my extended hand touched velvet.

I was behind a curtain. I fumbled up and down the cloth like a bad actor, looking for the opening. And found it after some difficulty, found that I was on a balcony that bellied out above a dining room that dwarfed the great hall of the moat house—as I had expected it would—but dwarfed it to a degree I never had imagined. For the dining hall of Castle di Caela was by itself the size of the moat house, and the cost to decorate that one great room alone would have drained entirely the Pathwarden treasuries. Torches and candles bathed the room in a steady light, white and yellow and amber and red, and those preparing the room for the feast looked almost toylike below me—musicians tuning the guitar and the elvish cello, in the center of the room a brace of tumblers practicing, and around the entertainers what must have been forty servants bustling about upon specific duties—spreading cloth over the tables, setting plates and crockery and glasses in front of each chair.

I seated myself in the upper darkness and watched the banquet begin.

Not long after I parted the curtains, the musicians struck up an air, something basso and Solamnic and serious. I sneezed once into the thick velvet, then settled back to watch as, gradually, the residents of Castle di Caela and their guests filed into the dining room in stately order.

Ladies came first. Enid—all blond hair and flowers and incredible blue linen—led the procession. Doubtless she would look even more beautiful come Sunday, when she led the procession in a full-dress Solamnic wedding, but from my seat I could see a worried look on her face tonight. Something was troubling those beautiful brown eyes.

Dannelle followed her, hands folded in front of her like a bridesmaid’s, still indignant at the situation and her cousin’s impending marriage, I could tell. She leaned forward and whispered something to Enid, and despite the ceremony, the cousins’ shoulders began to shake with silent laughter.

After these two came several other ladies of the court, dim in comparison to di Caelas, followed by Knights, some of whom had attended the tournament, evidently. Most prominent among them were a tall man with a whorled sea-shell of a helmet and a four hundred pound enormity in gaudy ceremonial armor. Sir Ledyard and Sir Ramiro, I was later to find out.

Sir Robert di Caela brought up the rear of the procession and sat at the head of a huge mahogany table in the center of the room. I watched the rest of the Knights stand by their chairs until the old man was seated, the high-backed chair at his right still empty—reserved for the groom, obviously.

Had these Knights been rivals to the groom, jousting and paying court to the Lady Enid? They seemed a little old for such foolishness.

Younger men followed, many of them carrying their first “tournament badge,” as Father used to call it—a bruise or a sprain or even a break that marked the bearer’s first entry into the lists. The arms of several sported slings and splints, and one of the men, his ankle obviously broken and set, came in on the shoulders of two others.

Alfric and Brithelm walked in among these fellows, both looking a little out of place amidst all this Solamnic style and glitter. Alfric looked like a buffoon, as usual, but it was reassuring to see Brithelm—all red-robed and unkempt, but healthy and intact and not about to put on airs regardless of the company. I suddenly found myself surprisingly glad that he had come, and that he had hauled my eldest brother out of the mire. Despite all these young blades gathered together, despite the usual good spirits that arose on the night before a wedding, especially at a banquet where the music and wine promised to flow freely, the feel of the place was somber, even cheerless.

Cheerless it remained until the Knights had almost all been seated. Then the music softened, and at the orders of Sir Robert, who was apparently an old sentimentalist himself, servants scurried throughout the room, extinguishing nearly half of the candles, half the lamps, and a few of the lights in the chandelier that hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. Now the light subsided to a deep amber. Illumined by the wavering light of the candles as it glittered on his polished breastplate, the bridegroom entered the room to a stirring military song played by the cellos and a little silver cornet that also glittered in the hands of the musician on the far side of the room.

In the height and darkness I couldn’t see him clearly. His stride was purposeful and long, and I noticed that even some of the more formidable-looking Knights stepped aside timidly at his approach. At a gesture from Sir Robert, those who were already seated stood up respectfully, each Knight lifting his wine glass to the approaching, dark-robed figure. The torchlight shimmered on the crystal, on the tilted red of the wine.

Before Sir Robert’s table, Sir Gabriel stopped and stood at attention, his gloved hands clenched behind his back. I caught a glimpse of his face in the elusive light of the great hall of di Caela: his was a pale countenance, with a dark brow, and he was certainly handsome enough. Nor did he seem too old for a nuptial tournament, unlike some of the others in the hall who, if they had fought in the lists over the last several days, should have been ashamed at acting half their age.

Sir Gabriel also seemed to know what he was doing, gliding through the ceremonial movements of the banquet as though he were a dancing master born to pomp and ritual.

He was handsome, young, and stylish. Able to take care of himself, too, if winning this tournament proved anything.

Sir Robert stood before him, glass raised.

“Good health and long life to Gabriel Androctus, Solamnic Knight of the Sword,” he began. “To whom, on the afternoon that follows this gaudy, ceremonious night, we shall give the greatest of our jewels.”

“Good health and long life to Sir Robert di Caela, Lord of the House of di Caela,” began the response of Sir Gabriel Androctus, but I confess I heard no more of it, stunned as I was by the familiar mellifluous poison of that voice. The voice I recognized immediately, that I had heard in moat house and swamp. The bridegroom was the Scorpion.

Chapter Fourteen

I was back ;in my bed before Sir Robert sent for me. There under the covers I feigned fever, moaned a little pathetically to the guards who had come to get me, then sent them back to Sir Robert with my regrets. Now came the hard part. Though the halls were mapped in the back of my mind, I had no earthly notion as to what lay behind most of the doors. Behind one of them was the Scorpion’s room, of course, wherein might lie some clue as to who he was and what he really wanted.

The curse was overdue at Castle di Caela, and from Bayard’s story back in the mountains, I was sure that old Benedict—the Scorpion himself—was at it again.

I waited and fiddled inconclusively with the Calantina. I ran through my options. Outside the window, the darkness began to settle on the courtyard, the walls and towers, and the far-flung holdings of Castle di Caela. Somewhere above me—perhaps at the very top of this tower, where the di Caela banner fluttered red and blue and white in the last hour before some steeplejack of a servant clambered up to lower it for the evening—a nightingale began its dark serenade of stars and moons.

There were only three candles in the room, and I lit them all against the approaching night. Then I walked to the chamber window and looked down.

Already the bailey below me was in shadows, and within it the shadowy servants moved, each with a horse prepared for a departing Knight. Soon the banquet would be over: indeed, I heard uproarious singing from somewhere toward the great hall, a sure sign that the celebration had passed from venison to brandy. Still no strategy. The weasel stuck in his tunnel. I stewed, tried the dice again. Sign of the Dragon? Something I recalled from the verses—something about “destruction a mask for innocence.” I could remember no more of it, so I let it go for the time being, walked back to the bed and sat down, looking toward the hearth and the glowing fire one of my brothers must have started before I arrived at the castle.

It was low, now, the fire was, and as it guttered even further it let the dark into the room. I was reaching for a candle when I heard the noises at the window—the scratching and the heartbeat sound of wing and beak against the thick glass.

I walked to the window and opened it wide, full knowing—as you know something by insight or by instinct—what awaited me outside.

I still ask myself why I let the raven into the room. I knew where it had come from, and I knew about the one who sent it—had sent it or had transformed himself into it or had entered it like water into a pitcher. I never figured out the mechanics. Though all I knew of the Scorpion was brutal and often bloody, I opened the window. Every possible fear arose in front of me as I walked to the window. I thought of the threats at the moat house and in Warden Swamp, of the goats mysteriously transformed and Agion dead in the Vingaard Mountains, the sharp tines of a trident mournfully deep in his chest. In fact, I had thought about it so much on that short walk from bedpost to shutter that when the living, breathing raven flew into the room, for a second I was relieved and even a little disappointed, having worked myself up for a monster.

It stared at me straight on, like a man or a horse would stare, instead of turning its head to the side and catching me with one glittering eye, like a natural bird would do. And the voice was not natural at all, yet frighteningly familiar.

“It is the Weasel again. Your foolish brothers were gossiping your arrival throughout the great hall tonight, and you’ve certainly aroused the curiosity of old di Caela. He has many questions for you.”

“Me? I’m just a lowly squire. Ex-squire actually,” I said, my mind racing.

“Well,” the raven hissed, “he can’t help feeling a little . . . sad for Bayard—coming all that way with a prophecy in hand only to be cast aside by plain bad luck and delay.” The raven chuckled here, I swear. “Only you and I know you were the luck, my little friend. You caused the delay. Sir Robert suspects as much, but only you and I know.”

“And yet. . .” I was trying to put together a strategy. “I do feel sorry for Bayard,” I replied, trying my best to sound casual, light-hearted. “Just because he could not win the hand of Enid di Caela shouldn’t mean that he goes away entirely bereft. Surely you, in all your good fortune, have a glimmer of compassion for him.”

“My good fortune?” the voice began in outrage and in anger, rising to a shriek in the frail throat of the bird as the raven fluttered from mantle to bedpost in an increasingly frantic circle around the room. “You call four hundred years of fruitless striving, of fruitless planning ‘good fortune’?”

The raven fluttered to the windowsill, motioning with its yellowed claw toward the heavens above the high tower of the castle. Beyond the conical roof, the flagpole now bare, above the thin strands of cloud, I could see where the warring constellations met, where the jaw of Paladine snapped at the tail of Takhisis there in the easternmost notch of the sky. Around that immortal, perpetual conflict, the lesser stars glimmered like thousands of inlaid jewels.

“No, my little friend,” the voice continued, the raven raising a yellowed and bony claw from the folds of his feathers, his eyes glittering red, then orange, then yellow.

“Bayard rushes to fulfill prophecies written centuries ago. Prophecies assuring the downfall of Benedict di Caela and of his descendants.”

I nodded stupidly, like a boy agreeing with the schoolmaster even when the lesson has lost him entirely.

“Prophecies recorded by men who received . . . a vision, perhaps. A vision received in a blinding moment of light and of insight. But afterwards, when the vision had passed and they were asked to make sense of it—of its chaos of words and names and reported events that had not happened but were to come—who is to say that they understood what they recorded?

“Who is to say Bayard has understood? For let me tell you, there is more than one way to read that prophecy of his.”

The bird perched on the windowsill, regarded me brightly, cruelly. It was then I first noticed that its feathers were matted and dull, the down on its head thinning, as though the creature were in the grip of some strange and lingering disease.

I heard a soft spattering against the glass of the window. I turned to this new sound, keeping my eyes cautiously on the bird.

Snow was falling in the courtyard. A snow of early autumn—unnatural and weird, and as the snow fell, the raven spoke.

“You know the story of Enric Stormhold?”

I did not know the tale and mutely shook my head.

“Enric Stormhold—once a Knight of the Sword such as Bayard Brightblade, then a Knight of the Crown. Seeking to be a Knight of the Rose he was, and seeking that Knighthood not as much for the good he might perform through the offices of that order, oh, no, but for the trappings of honor and of glory that order might bring.

“Oh, yes, I know that a Knight can strive for both, can desire equally and richly the glory of Knighthood and the common good. I know that nothing is wrong with such a balance of desires.

“Nothing . . . necessarily.

“It was Enric Stormhold who led the Knights against the men of Neraka, down in the passes where your ancestor”—he gestured at me—“distinguished himself for bravery, if you can imagine, won the family name that you have rubbed into the dirt and stomped upon in the last few miserable months . . .”

“At your insistence!” I cried, and the raven laughed.

“That’s neither here nor there, little Weasel. But back to Enric Stormhold. The story goes that he consulted a Calantine. Perhaps you have heard of them. They are the priests of the false god Gilean, or at least the false version of that false worship as found in Estwilde. They read the red dice and recite verses about animals. And call it prophecy.”

His little black eyes glittered with malice. They were alert, the cold eyes of a viper.

“I know of the Calantina. But what of Enric?”

“Well, upon Enric’s shoulders was the defense of Solamnia itself. Though he was a brave and worthy Knight, the burden was a heavy one. He was none too sure of the wisdom of his strategies or the strength of his heart, so he asked the Calantine the fate of the campaign. Had he not asked, had he relied on the prompting of his large spirit and trusted in the ways and will of the gods, would we not trust him and believe in him more?”

“The Calantine, sir. The prophecy.”

“The Calantine cast the two and the ten,” the bird proclaimed, then threw back its head and laughed harshly. Two and Ten. Sign of the Raven.

“The oracle itself was right, of course. The Sign of the Raven is that of illusion, of false assurance in a dangerous country. Is that not right, Galen Pathwarden?”

I stammered for a moment.

“That’s one interpretation, sir.”

“Spoken like a Calantine,” the Raven chuckled dreadfully.

“Of course the Calantines who read the dice for Enric nodded and nodded and said, ‘The oracle tells us, sir, that your defense of Solamnia against the forces of Neraka will be the last defense you will make, that afterward peace will come to you and to Solamnia again.’

“And Enric rejoiced at the oracle, at its promise of success to him and to his armies. In one interpretation.

“But other things came to pass—things unimagined by Enric and unspoken by the Calantines who may or may not have foreseen them—what, after all, does it matter? The peace that came to Solamnia was indeed the peace that comes from a victorious campaign, engineered by Enric Stormhold, who left a handful of men in the pass at Chaktamir, where they held off the Nerakan army from sunrise to sundown, buying valuable time for the Solamnics at a staggering cost.

“Two hundred Knights, it is said, defended that pass. Fifteen lived to tell of that heroism.

“Your father was among them, Galen.”

“Nor does he talk of it all that much. But what of Enric?”

“Enric. Peace came to him, too, just as the Calantine said it would. While the brave men held Chaktamir, Enric led his host to another passage, little known and not surprisingly open. They circled south around the Nerakans and came in behind them, bringing death from the east. Of the thousand Nerakans who filled the pass, not a man was left.

“But the peace that came to Enric was the sleep of death, brought about by a Nerakan arrow in the last hour of the battle. As he raised the victorious flag of the Solamnic armies, a wounded archer, lying as though dead in the center of the pass, scrambled quickly to his feet and fired a black arrow into Enric Stormhold’s throat.”

“A black arrow?”

“Raven feathers, Galen Pathwarden. So the Calantines were right, and the Sign of the Raven flourished in a manner that no man—not even the Calantines themselves—had foreseen.”

“This is all very interesting, sir, but I confess that I’m at a loss as to the meaning of this whole Enric Stormhold business. How does it tie in with your being here in Castle di Caela? Is it just that prophecies may mean something entirely different than we think they mean? If that’s the case, I assure you I’ll take the advice to heart. There’s no need to haunt and bode.”

“Oh . . . prophecies may mean different things to different eyes. Even places do that,” the raven croaked.

“What does Chaktamir mean to you?”

The bird cocked its head curiously, wickedly.

“Why . . . it’s history, sir. Where the Solamnics held off the Nerakans. Where Father fought.”

“Oh, but it’s so much more,” the raven croaked dryly. “Places mean different things to different eyes. And so does history, little man.”

“History?”

“The history, for example, of Benedict di Caela.”

When the name was mentioned, the three thin candles sputtered and went out, plunging the room into a deeper darkness. Then I felt a pricking at my shoulders, the skittering of little claws, like a rat had boarded me. I struggled to shrug off the creature, but I found that I could not move.

Then the brush of a feather at my chest, and a smell of cologne, underlying it another smell of something old and beginning to rot.

And then the voice resumed.

“You have heard the story of Benedict di Caela? Hear it again, little Galen, this time the way it really happened. For history is a web, a labyrinth, and those who remember it remember only their own paths out.”

“I knew it,” I muttered, and the bird at my shoulder chuckled dryly, viciously.

“Knew . . . what?” it asked with a cruel playfulness.

“That you were Benedict di Caela! That the Scorpion and Sir Gabriel Androctus, that both of them—both of you—were Benedict di Caela!”

“Are Benedict di Caela,” the raven hissed. “It’s no great deduction, Weasel. I come back here rather often, you know. But I do that because this castle is mine. And the holdings. And the title itself.

“Four centuries ago I died twice. Once to the east here, at Chaktamir, which is more than a monument to Solamnic saber-rattling. More than a pass where Enric Stormhold fell.”

“I thought you were defeated at the Throtyl Gap near Estwilde.”

“Yes, and the family version has it that I fell there. That I had traveled only that far to the East, gathering an army of rebels as I went. But the truth, little Weasel, is that I was hunted down like the common criminal they had decided I was. As I retreated eastward to Neraka, alone and disconsolate but bound for what I imagined was safety at last, a party of seven closed upon me. My brother Gabriel murdered me there, and my head tumbled from my shoulders.

“But I was dead by then, anyhow. That is, in a matter of speaking. For my father Gabriel had pronounced me dead in the great hall where I dined only this evening, pronounced me dead so he could smuggle his title and lands to my younger brother, my murderer. Whom Father always favored.”

“Sir, I hate to keep being a . . . precisionist, but there is the small matter of your elder brother Duncan’s mysterious death, how it seemed to be wedded to your mixing potions in the tower of the castle. After all, fathers don’t usually pronounce sons dead for no reason.”

“But it was for no reason, Galen. You know the Gabriels of this story by now, know that they are merciless against all adversaries, all rivals.

“That is all I was to them. Adversary. Rival. My poisons were for rats, no matter what monstrosities they imagined.”

“I find it hard to give that credence, sir.”

The claws dug sharply into my shoulder. I flinched and stifled a cry, as the warm, unhealthy smell coursed by me again.

“What you find hard to believe is no concern to me,” the raven rasped. “Brother Duncan died of something. Who knows what it was? But whatever it was, it was not my doing.”

“And the fire?”

“Was mine, admittedly. I burned my brother’s body, yes, and in one of the tower rooms you can see from this window. It was a pyre most . . . Solamnic, for Duncan burned with his weaponry about him, his hands folded upon his chest, clutching a volume of the Measure.

“Of course they do not tell you how I sent him off heroically, content as they are in breathing the air of conspiracy and plot. Di Caelas are bad for that, I know—too intricate for their own good.”

“But why burn Duncan’s body? The clerics of Mishakal, who studied the dead for signs of poison—”

“Would have found what father told them to find. And he would have had his proof then—the testimonies of those sanctimonious men of the goddess would say, ‘Yes, Sir Gabriel, your youngest son—the one named for you—is now your most capable heir, while the middle son is an abject villain, as you have always dreamed and imagined.’

“But I never harmed my brother. Indeed, I followed all the rules, the respectable second son unto the time that Father pronounced me dead.

“Then, over four centuries, I’ve tried to take by force what was rightfully mine, what was seized from me by inveiglement and ambush. You have heard, no doubt, of the rats, the floods, the fires, and the ogres. Each generation I would launch another natural disaster, and each generation some capable di Caela would find a way to steal my inheritance from my grasp once more.”

“What’s it like, sir? This being dead? And why wait a generation between attempts?”

A long pause, as the dark about me was awash in silence, with the too-sweet attar of flowers, with the flutter of wings.

The bird began to whisper.

“I can remember . . . or think I can remember . . . burning in the tower along with the rats I had unleashed on this castle. I remember drowning in the flood, remember all kinds of undoings in all kinds of disastrous circumstances. And when I remember clearly again, it is twenty years later, or thirty.

“Between those times is a hot, red darkness. I sleep through most of it. Sometimes I recall something of lights—scarlet lights, as though smoke itself were burning. And voices, though I can never quite discover words in the swirl of sounds around me.

“Once, the darkness resolved into a cavernous room, its floor a mirror of polished onyx. And about that mirror sat a score of Knights, their weapons broken, their heads bent as they stared into the mirror, which reflected nothing but stars.

“I do not know but that I dreamed those men, that mirror.

“Once the darkness became a landscape bare and cratered, and the moon that rose above it was as black as the onyx mirror, yet radiant somehow. Nothing lived in that forsaken country, but somewhere in the shadow of the rocks a creature was gibbering and whining—whether wounded or lying in wait, I could not tell.

“That was early on. Nor am I sure whether I dreamed that country, either.”

He paused. A faint light crept to the edge of the window. Solinari was on the rise, and some things—larger things—in the room took on line and form. I could see the outline of the bed, the dresser.

“But regardless of the dream,” the raven continued, “regardless of the cries and the torment and the long sleep, I have always awakened in sunlight, dazed but afoot upon Krynn once more. And once more I would set myself to the task of recovering what should be mine.

“This time, however, is different. For the first time in these four hundred years—for the very first time, mind you—the inheritance of the di Caela family descends to a woman. Descends to Lady Enid. And this time I have chosen to follow the rules once again. This time no rats, no goblins, no . . . scorpions. I shall murder nobody, steal from no one.

“Perhaps you wondered why I didn’t descend on Bayard, on you, and kill you outright?”

“It occured to me long ago, sir, but I had no objections to your oversight, if oversight it was.”

“I followed the rules. I murdered no one.”

“Most people follow that rule, sir. In Coastlund it’s considered a matter of course to pass the day without murdering someone. But what about the Knights at the tournament?”

“Slain under the fair and mutually accepted rules of Solamnic combat. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy seeing Orban of Kern fall shattered or the blade of my sword find its home in Sir Prosper Inverno.”

“And Jaffa? What of the peasant?”

“He came at me with a sword, Weasel. What would you have me do? And yet I loved watching him fall, knowing that Bayard Brightblade would suffer the blame.”

I paused and took a breath before I asked:

“What about Agion?”

“Agion?” The bird stirred on my shoulder. Again I caught the smell of rottenness beneath the cologne.

“The centaur, damn it! Your marks were all over that ogre business in the Vingaard Mountains, and you can’t tell me that—”

“That the fight between Bayard and the ogre was not fair? Of course I can tell you that. The battle was Knight against foe, and was not this . . . Agion warned that to intrude in a conflict of Knight versus foe would somehow be . . . dishonorable? The death of the centaur is regrettable, but you cannot deny that he received due payment for his little transgression.”

I said nothing.

But in silence I made a vow to myself and to Agion that I would do whatever it took to undo this monster at my shoulder.

“But why? What earthly use do you have for the di Caela inheritance?”

“None.” The wing of the bird brushed against me, and the smell of old decay passed over me once more.

“None anymore. On this side of the darkness the lands pale, the gems and gold shine like rotten wood, no longer with their accustomed light. Even the daughters . . . pale as I cease to remember them.

“No, I do this because the di Caelas would have these things, would pass them on into the warm, living hands of descendants.

“I do this for ruin, Weasel. Simple and straightfoward ruin. And for me, ruin has become enough.

“So I follow the rules and marry the Lady Enid di Caela. Then, beautiful bright thing though she may be, and as much as I may regret the loss of such beauty and brightness, I shall have to kill her. With a ‘bright blade’ of my own devising. For the rules are over then, little Galen. My inheritance is mine once more. I am the di Caela, and my word is law.”

I tried to move, to throw the loathsome thing from my shoulder, but I felt stunned, paralyzed. It was as though I were one of those creatures that the scorpion stings before dragging it into a remote and dark place where it skitters over the helpless, dying prey and feasts.

“Do not breathe a word of this, Weasel,” whispered the raven. “Oh, no, not a word. For Sir Bayard is already poisoned against you and Sir Robert is heavy with grievance. Of course, I am . . . eternally grateful for your assistance. But that would not stop me from gouging out your eyes and feasting upon them, from—what was it I said back at your moat house?—dancing in your skin! Or something worse, oh, so much worse, I assure you, if you ever betray my confidence.

“Apart from which, young mister Galen, we are bound together in sworn partnership, are we not? And I may yet have further call for your services.”

There was no telling what the Scorpion had planned for me at that moment, in what dark recess he saw my role in the days that followed. Certainly he had told me more than it was wise to tell, if he intended only to marry the girl and leave me alone.

Brithelm came into the room then, carrying a tray of food on his head, and the bird took wing, battering itself against the thick glass of the chamber window and dropping to the sill, where it lay motionless and dark in the slanting light of the red moon.

For once I was glad Brithelm never bothered to knock.

“Supper, Galen!” my spritual brother sang out merrily, craning his neck to balance the laden tray. “The guardsmen say you’re under the weather, that your feathers are drooping!”

I felt movement rush through my arms. I felt my legs weaken, knock together with relief and remembered fright.

“Why, what are you doing standing up? Bed rest for what ails you, Galen, and soup. And wine, though I think you’re under age. Why, once you’re fortified, I’ll bet that—”

“Brithelm!”

My brother fell silent and stopped in the middle of the room, tray rocking on the thicket of his red hair.

“Brithelm, I am not well.”

As my brother wrapped me in blankets and fed me hot soup and mulled wine, he told his story.

“Alfric, too, faced the satyrs we faced in the depths of the swamp,” Brithelm explained innocently. “He told me so. Nor did he know at the time that they were illusions only. He killed several of the satyrs, discovered—as we discovered—that they were goats, and filled with a noble rage . . .”

“‘A noble rage,’ Brithelm? Were those Alfric’s words?”

“Yes, but I think they are fitting, don’t you? For filled with a noble rage at the fact that innocent animals were being used for the most wicked of designs, he sought the encampment of the illusionist, and finding the villain not far from the site where he found the satyrs, put the entire group to flight.

“Perhaps that’s why we had so little trouble in driving the villain from the swamp when we confronted him later.”

“I suppose that is Alfric’s theory, at any rate.”

“Indeed. He suggested to me that it was his strategy that cleared the way for the heroics of Sir Bayard Brightblade. Although Alfric quite humbly denies that credit for driving the evil from the swamp should fall to him alone.”

“Quite humbly,” I agreed.

I felt even worse. The sickness I had invented for the guards seemed real now, rushing over me in dizzying waves. I coughed, sneezed once. I wrapped the blankets more tightly about me, protruding my hand only so that I could pick up the bowl of mulled wine and drink from it. I looked to the window, where the small dark form lay still.

Brithelm babbled on about Alfric’s bravery, about how he had rescued Alfric from the quagmire, and about how they had left together the morning after we had parted. How they had passed over the plains of Coastlund eventlessly, riding horses Alfric had received as gifts of gratitude from the centaur chief Archala for having helped drive the satyrs from the swamp.

It seemed that even the centaurs had bought Alfric’s harebrained story.

Brithelm went on and on. He spoke of how the time had passed quickly on the road, and pleasantly except for the rising fear in both of them that they would not find Bayard’s pass, would have to turn north and go nearly to Palanthas in order to negotiate the mountains, and that the delay would cause Alfric to miss the tournament. And Brithelm went on, as to how “something” told him to follow a flight of the ravens, that soon in their journey the ravens began to perch in the branches around them, croaking forebodingly, and when Alfric screamed or turned to flee, the birds took wing toward the east and Solamnia.

I sipped more wine, looked again to the window, and shivered.

Brithelm said that, by following the ravens, he and Alfric found the pass. They crossed the mountains in the dead of night.

I remembered the voices that had awakened me.

Discovering the pass, the quick, unimpeded journey through it: it was all amazing to Brithelm, the ease a sure sign that Fate’s hand was guiding the fortunes of his elder brother. And yet, when they arrived at Castle di Caela, to his great surprise—and apparently Alfric’s, too—the tournament was over. Sir Robert di Caela was polite, but distraught and abstracted, installing them in quarters at the keep and praising both of them mightily for their perseverance over rough and dangerous roads.

“For some reason, though, Sir Robert is less than pleased with Bayard Brightblade,” Brithelm concluded, and stared at me curiously. It was as though his eyes bored through me.

He rose from his seat on the bed and walked to the window. Tenderly he picked up the lifeless body of the bird, and cupped it in his hands.

“The poor thing must have flown in here and battered itself to death against the window. It’s odd, Galen,” he said, turning to face me. “Odd that the servants hadn’t disposed of it before they moved you in here. It’s been dead several days now. How sad.” Unceremoniously, he dropped the bird out the window.

“Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of thing a sick boy should have in his room.”

Dead several days. Like the prisoner in the moat house.

Whether from the wine or the fever or from being tired of lying, I felt tears rush into my eyes. I had trouble keeping them down as I spoke.

“Brithelm, I have done some terribly wrong things.”

He looked at me evenly and nodded. And I told my story, or, at least as much as I dared tell.

“So that bird was Benedict di Caela?” Brithelm asked between mouthfuls of boiled egg, balancing the empty tray on his head.

“No, damn it! That bird was a stopping-off place for Benedict di Caela, for Gabriel Androctus, for the Scorpion, for what have you. Whoever or whatever he is, he’s still about the premises, and plotting villainy.”

Brithelm was to his feet at once, headed for the door.

“You and I will simply have to go to Sir Robert di Caela and tell him that this . . . Gabriel Androctus he fancies his future son-in-law is in fact the family curse come to roost.”

“I think not, Brithelm. No telling the tricks that old Benedict has up his scaly sleeve.”

“Then it’s also time to tell Sir Bayard the whole story, Galen. So you won’t be unprotected.”

“Oh, I think not, Brithelm! The world may be as trusting a place as you seem to imagine, but one thing I can rely on is that Bayard Brightblade will dismantle me if this story is told to him.”

“Then,” Brithelm concluded, “it is time for dismantlement. Do you want your soup?”

“No . . . I’m far from hungry. Far from sober, too, with the mulled wine you’ve plied me with. I’m not drunk enough to confess everything in my dark past, though. I’m afraid that would take dwarf spirits or something stronger.”

Brithelm nodded, his wide face buried in the soup bowl.

When he rose up for air, he had little to say.

“We’ll go to Bayard as soon as you’ve weathered this fever. But we have to go there. After all, think of Sir Robert. Think of Enid—if half of what that raven boded is true, she’s in dreadful danger.

“Think of Agion.”

Something beyond wine and fever impelled me. This time I was sure.

“Brithelm, I have to go tonight. Bayard will be gone by noon tomorrow—you can count on it. He’s too depressed to stay for the wedding.

“The wedding!”

“I had forgotten it, too,” Brithelm declared calmly. “Are these potatoes in the bottom of the bowl? I had been avoiding them, thinking they were turnips.”

“We must get to Bayard, and get to him tonight!”

“Very well,” Brithelm agreed, bent curiously over the soup bowl.

He glanced up at me, once more staring me through.

“And no lies this time, Galen. Not like Alfric.”

He must have seen the look of surprise on my face, for he laughed, looked down, and stirred in the soup bowl with his finger.

“Surely you didn’t think I believed our brother’s tales of heroism.”

“Then why . . .”

He looked up again, smiled at me.

“Simply because it made him feel better. He was dreadfully embarrassed—passed over for squirehood again and again, and then, when he tried to do something about it, he gets mired by his baby brother waist deep in the Warden Swamp, squealing until rescued by his middle brother. He needed a little . . . ornamental passage in his story, a part where he was the hero.”

“But then, what about me and having to tell Sir Bayard all about—”

“Same reason.”

Again he looked down into the bowl and stirred some more.

“Potatoes get so confoundedly transparent when you boil them too long. Are these turnips, Galen?”

He held up the bowl to me, smiling that vacant grin once more.

As you might imagine, Bayard was not overjoyed to see me. Shivering in the night air, which was burrowing into my cloak and tunic more ferociously than it ever did in the mountains, I approached the pavilion where his standard had been raised that afternoon and saw him sitting alone, away from the other Knights. Wrapped in the blanket from which he had drawn the ceremonial Brightblade shield, he also shivered in the brisk autumn night. He had left the shield face-down in the dirt beside him.

The night was still overcast and chill. Not far from Bayard, the other Knights drank roka and played music and told stories, enjoying the company before most of them struck camp and returned to Palanthas, to Caergoth, to Solanthus, to those few places in which the Order was still permitted and still welcome. Brithelm walked among them, slack-jawed with amazement at the tales the Knights were telling.

“Do you suppose these are true, Galen—all these tales about sea monsters and abductions by eagles? Do you suppose Sir Ramiro over there really has a talking sword?”

“I suppose that it makes him feel good to tell the others about it, Brithelm,” I responded vacantly, looking across the dappling of firelight and darkness into the campsite of my former protector. Who sulked at the twilit edge of things, his attention evidently on the stars. It was almost a pitiful sight, and I suspect I felt almost sorry for Bayard.

I tried to slip by the revelry, and could have done so with ease, what with the citterns and the clatter of cups and the boasts.

But the smoke of the campfires or the dust in the rising wind—or just plain fatigue, if that is possible—brought on a fit of sneezing as though I had rolled the length of a country in goldenrod. The fit over, I sniffed, walked on as if I belonged at the encampment, or as if I had a message for my protector that would not bear obstructing.

Sir Ramiro of the Maw, all four hundred pounds of him, stopped me before I could get to Bayard.

“I would not approach him if I were you, boy. He doesn’t seem all that pleased with any of the business that plagued this tournament, and I understand you had a little hand in delaying him.”

“So he’s talking about that, is he?” I began. But Ramiro waved his fat hands quickly, so quickly that his forearms quivered.

“No, no, boy, you’d never hear such talk from Bayard Brightblade. Your brother was quite vocal at the banquet earlier, and seemed altogether pleased that you’d played merry hell with Sir Bayard’s intentions. Seeing as that’s the case, if you’ve come for forgiveness, I’d advise you to wait on it until morning.”

The big Knight stepped in front of me and folded his arms across his expanse of chest. It was like having a gate closed in your face, and I stepped back, almost into the cheery campfire of two Knights from Caergoth, and adopted my best official voice, lowered at least one strenuous octave.

“So Bayard isn’t pleased with me, Sir Ramiro? Perhaps he’ll be pleased when the family di Caela, the beautiful Enid included, is finally consumed by the curse it’s been carrying for four hundred years.”

“The curse again? I thought the di Caelas had put that yarn to rest.”

“Please let me through, sir. The ill tidings are for Sir Bayard’s ears first.”

I coughed again, and began the long, circular route around Sir Ramiro. He started to stand in front of me once more, but Brithelm distracted him with some questions about the talking sword, and I was allowed to pass freely through the encampment to where Bayard sat, stargazing, huddled under blankets and gloom. I paused and took stock as Bayard pondered the moon.

“Things at Castle di Caela, sir. They’re in bad shape, I fear.”

“So Robert decided he didn’t want you, either?” Bayard asked icily, still staring above me at whatever pattern he saw in the stars. I followed his gaze to the zenith of the sky, where the two dragons danced around the Book of Gilean. Black clouds scudded rapidly past the stars. There was the promise of rain in the smell of the air.

Things were strange and forbidding, and I had a reluctant Knight on my hands.

“It’s more complicated than that, Bayard,” I began.

“Yes, it’s a complicated situation, Galen,” he snapped, eyes breaking from contemplation of the heavens to fix totally, bleakly on my face. “But I’ve solved the puzzle. The solution is that, despite all their father’s good intention, the sons of Andrew Pathwarden are like crabs in a jar: one scrambles over another until he reaches the lip of the vessel, then the one below him reaches and claws him down. Except for the middle son, who clings to some kind of basic goodness.”

He nodded at Brithelm as he said this. Then he stood and wrapped the blanket tightly around him against the rising wind and the smell of approaching rain. He stalked away from me, the silence and the long strides daring me to try to catch up, until we stood about a hundred feet apart.

Huge drops of rain spattered on the ground around us. Thunder rolled out of the south. I had to shout above the natural noise and drama.

“Benedict di Caela has returned.”

Lightning turned the sky white over the field. For a moment Bayard was clearly outlined, clearly visible. In the thunder that followed, I could not hear him, but I clearly saw him mouth the word What. As the lightning flashed and the thunder followed again, the rain began to sweep over the ground between us. I sprinted to join my protector, splashing through the new and sudden mud on the road as I ran toward him. Water soaked into my blankets. I felt cold and wet and aching all the way into my bones. I must have passed out. It was Bayard’s shout that dragged me back onto the rainy road to the Castle di Caela. He was standing beside me. He had me by the shoulders and was shaking me like a schoolmaster shakes a troublesome student.

“What’s wrong with you? Galen? What’s . . .” Then pause—then shaking me again, but more gently this time.

“Let’s get you out of the ram.”

Lifting his blanket above the both of us, he ushered me toward a grove up the road toward the castle. It was evergreen mostly, so the leaves remained on many of the trees, and the branches of those vallenwoods scattered among the cedars and junipers were thick enough to shelter a party much larger than ours from the downpour. There we sat, Bayard draping the blanket over two low hanging branches above us, forming a crude lean-to that kept out the weather.

I lay down beneath the blanket, breathing in the old smells of wool and dust and faint rain and sweat and horses. Bayard crouched over me.

“What is it, Bayard?”

“‘Sir Bayard.’ Like it or not, you’re back in my employ. There’s not a dry stick or twig in the whole damn grove. Looks like we’ll sit this one out without a fire.”

A look of concern crossed Bayard’s face. He leaned over, placed his hand on my forehead.

“You’re burning up, boy.”

Come to think of it, I was a little stifled, but I had fancied it was only being under blankets and all wrapped against the cold in the first place. I started to beg Bayard to take me back toward the fires of the encampment, where I could warm my feet and where I could mend, but then that didn’t make any sense because my problem was being too hot in the first place and . . .

I remember Bayard asking, “Now what’s this about Benedict di Caela?”

Then I remember nothing else.

Chapter Fifteen

Light washed over my face, and for a moment I thought I was being blinded. I willed myself not to see the light, to suffer the brightness, but then in a blur I saw clouds above me darting in and out of my vision. At first I thought they were moving, those clouds, until I felt hard wood tilting and rocking below me, and I heard the clatter of hooves and the breathing of horses.

I was traveling somewhere under a daylit sky, shadowed by clouds and by birds flying overhead. Brithelm’s face was above me, too. I heard him speak, and heard Bayard’s voice behind him somewhere, almost indistinguishable from the creaking of wheels and the song of a lark.

I tried to speak, to ask the obvious questions: Where am I?, What happened to me?, and Why all the hushed concern and the fuss?. But Brithelm was saying something to me about resting, relaxing, and his hand on my forehead was as cool and soothing as the night air. Behind him I heard the voices of women, one of which sounded like Enid—that sweet, high music of birds.

I hoped devoutly it was Enid, for the voice brought back the sight of her in my memory and imagining. But the cart passed again into shadow, which in turn passed into great and abiding darkness.

I was in a room somewhere, remotely familiar. A tapestry hung on the far wall, blurred in my adjusting eyes and in candlelight. A face appeared over me, another blur of shadow and color. Strands of wild hair, disheveled and as red as the red robe.

“He’s waking, Dannelle. Go get the Knights.”

The sound of a door closing softly. I tried to sit up. It was too tiring, and when I tried, the light in the room spun like stars.

“Rest, little brother,” said Brithelm’s voice, cool and soothing. “If you wrestle the fever, it will throw you.

“And besides, it’s a hard task you have coming. I’ve tried to soften it some, explained the whole thing and how sorry you are, to Sir Bayard Brightblade. Argued with Sir Robert and that gentleman in black—”

Gentleman in black!

“—to postpone this . . . talk, but they would hear none of it. They insisted that we settle the matter now, and the three of them are on their way to these chambers, where they will hear your story.

“Rest now,” Brithelm continued. “You are among friends.”

I closed my eyes and resolved to appear as pathetic as I felt.

I must have dozed, as several voices mingled in the room, changing in pitch and tone and in the shapes of words every time I rose far enough out of sleep to hear them. At last there was movement by my bed and I opened my eyes slowly, pathetically, as though I were being called then and there from the borders of the afterlife.

Bayard stood at my bedside.

“Brithelm says you’re better.”

I nodded as weakly as I could, tried to appear brave but on the wane.

“You have other guests. I have urged them to wait for your recovery, as has your brother Brithelm, but Sir Gabriel insists that the wedding go on as planned. Nonetheless, Sir Robert di Caela wants to talk to you. And he’s brought with him Sir Gabriel, who insists that he’s never seen you before in his life. Much less transacted with you.

“You know, Galen, that I haven’t the faintest idea whether you know something, or you’re lying, or you’ve dreamed all of this up out of fever and wine and guilt.

“Let’s just say I have to trust you now.”

He laid his hand on his sword.

“And you can trust me, Galen Pathwarden. If what you speak is the truth, and what you say angers this Gabriel Androctus or Benedict di Caela or whatever infernal name he goes by or chooses next, rest assured that while Bayard Brightblade breathes, the man will not harm you.”

“That’s reassuring, sir. As long as you breathe.”

Bayard laughed softly, then called over his shoulder.

“Let the guests in, Brithelm.”

They stood around me as though they were on vigil. Somber, silent, they heard the story from its inception in the moat house through the swamp and the mountains and my surprising discovery here at Castle di Caela. Androctus was disturbingly calm, hearing my accusations as though they were imagined out of delirium or had to do with someone else. He even looked touched when I talked about what happened to Agion in the mountains and couldn’t go on for a minute. So I wondered until Gabriel Androctus spoke. For it was that nightmare voice that had haunted me since the moat house—all sweet and smooth and ruinous.

“This young man has been through terrible things,” he said warmly. “No wonder that such hardships have . . . clouded his reason, made him see enemies where no enemies are. If there is anything I can do to make him more comfortable, I should be more than happy to do so after the ceremony.”

Sir Robert glanced sidelong at his future son-in-law—a look that held no approval.

“But of course, Sir Gabriel,” he sighed, “the question becomes that ceremony. For if there is an ounce of truth in what the boy says—”

“That I am Benedict di Caela?” Sir Gabriel interrupted incredulously, then burst into loud and terrible laughter. “There’s too much malice in you, Sir Robert. You’ve been wounded too long by the curse your forefathers inflicted.”

He smiled wickedly and leaned against the tapestry.

“But let us be fair. Does the boy have an ounce of evidence beyond his fevered testimony?”

Bayard and Sir Robert looked at me.

My thoughts raced.

Evidence? From the mountains? The swamp?

Nothing.

From . . .

“Bayard, please bring me my cloak. It’s over there by the fire.”

Bayard did as I asked, never taking his eyes from Gabriel Androctus.

Who looked puzzled now, and maybe a little worried.

Bayard handed me the cloak, warmed and partially dried on the hearth, but still wet in its folds from last night’s drenching downpour. I coughed at the smell of wet wool, then fumbled through the pockets, past the Calantina dice, past the tooled gloves . . .

“Here they are!”

Sir Bayard and Sir Robert leaned forward eagerly. Sir Gabriel took a short, tentative step toward the door.

“These stones!” I proclaimed, opening the soggy drawstring of the bag, letting the half dozen opals tumble onto the bed, where they stood out soft and white and lovely against the rough bedclothes.

“So?” Sir Gabriel shot back quickly. “This is some sort of incriminating evidence?”

“I should say it is! These are the very opals you bribed me with when this whole unsavory business began. When you wanted Sir Bayard’s armor back in my father’s moat house, when you took it and performed the gods know what outrage with it—”

“Enough, Galen,” Bayard cautioned. “You’ve made your point. Does this persuade you, Sir Robert?”

“Not unless he’s a bigger fool than I think he is,” snapped Sir Gabriel, as Sir Robert leaned over the bed, picked up one of the opals, and held it to the light. “How many places, I ask, could a boy of Galen Pathwarden’s. . . proclivities have ‘discovered’ a purse filled with semiprecious stones?”

“What’s this about being a ‘bigger fool than you think I am,’ Androctus?” Sir Robert snapped back, reddening. “Just how big a damn fool do you think I am, you sable-robed prima donnal” he roared, and Bayard leaped between the two men, parting them.

Androctus stepped once more toward the door. “You misunderstand me, sir,” he soothed. “I was only saying that the lad might have found these anywhere, and the fact that they were on his person should not lead us to the conclusion that I bribed him with stones.”

Sir Robert recovered his calm and his dignity. He spoke coldly, directly.

“But these are glain opals, Sir Gabriel. From Estwilde. Found only in Estwilde, mined only near the Throtyl Gap.”

“Where Benedict di Caela fell!” Bayard exclaimed.

“Well, not exactly,” I interrupted. “Benedict di Caela fell in the pass at Chaktamir . . .”

“How do you know that?” exclaimed Sir Robert eagerly, spinning to face me so rapidly that he lost his balance and toppled over the bed, scattering the opals. “That’s the part of the story . . .”

“That the di Caelas hide?” interrupted Androctus, his dark eyes bright with fury, but his voice surprisingly level all of a sudden, even quiet. “And why do they hide that part of the story, Sir Robert? Why, because the whole sorry tale is brimming with villains, is it not? And not only the oft maligned Benedict.”

He turned slowly, fingered the edge of the tapestry. It was a charming picture of a hunt, five Knights on horseback, each bearing the recognizable di Caela profile.

With a quick step, Androctus stood by the center of the tapestry, pointing at the foremost mounted figure.

“Gabriel di Caela the Elder disinherited a son who, by all rights, should have been the di Caela in the generation that followed.”

The figure on the tapestry smoldered, burning slowly and smokelessly. We all gaped, dumbfounded, then considered our options. Sir Robert stepped toward Gabriel, then thought better of it. Bayard’s hand went to his sword, waiting for Gabriel to make the first move.

As though the tapestry were a map and he was giving a history lecture, Gabriel’s hand moved to the hindmost rider. “Then Gabriel di Caela the Younger amassed an army against his disinherited brother, defeating that brother in a battle at the Throtyl Gap, then hounding him westward over the plains of Neraka until they both reached Chaktamir, the high pass, and there . . .”

The figure of Gabriel the Younger caught fire in the same slow flame.

“Enough!” shouted Robert di Caela, and then more calmly. “And how do you know this history, Sir Gabriel?”

“Oh, common knowledge,” Sir Gabriel smiled. “And common gems, too, even if they are the glain opals of Estwilde. I mean, the boy’s dice are from Estwilde, too, and no burglar—”

“What dice are those, Sir Gabriel?” Bayard shot back. “How is it that you’ve never met Galen before, and yet you’re familiar with the contents of his pockets?”

Androctus paused, stared at me.

Within the black pupils of those eyes glimmered a red fire, banked but unmistakably there in all its evil and evil intent. The fire smoldered, went black, and the dark Knight turned calmly to Bayard.

“His brother,” Androctus explained. “Who is it . . . Alfric Pathwarden? He told me of Galen’s superstition last night as he gloated at the banquet. Despicable little chap.”

“Pretty thin, Sir Gabriel,” Sir Robert stated dryly. “It does not satisfy our uncertainty. It seems we have no choice but to postpone the wedding another week. I regret the inconvenience to all the guests planning to attend, but the delay is unavoidable as we seek for the truth in this murky matter.”

“The truth?” Sir Gabriel asked in outrage. “What do you know of the truth?” He turned from the tapestry, folded his arms in front of him, and glared at Sir Robert.

“The truth, quite frankly, is that I do not like you, Sir Gabriel Androctus,” spat Sir Robert, his face gloriously red beneath the silver of his moustache and hair. “And I am still alive and lord of this castle, which I shall pass on to whomever I damn well please. I may lose a little face in the matter, but it’ll be worth it if you are Benedict di Caela. Even if you are not, it would almost be worth going back on my word just to see the look on your face!”

A cold wind swept through the room. Mist rose out of the floor, and the tapestry flapped on the wall. Sir Gabriel stood taller, until he seemed to tower over Bayard and Sir Robert, who both were startled, stepping back from the strange, transforming figure in front of them. Who spoke in loud tones that shattered the glass in the window, sending me burrowing into my blankets.

There in the darkness I heard a scuffling, the sound of fabric tearing, the shivering music of more glass breaking. And over it all, the resonant voice of the Scorpion.

“The truth, Sir Robert, is that once again you are wresting my birthright from me! And this after I played by the rules! After I fought fairly and danced in the lists with all your princes and popinjays, raising my visor and proffering lances at the beck and call of a brassy Solamnic trumpet!

“Oh, your Knights are in love with the sound of honor, the mouthings and motions of the old school, but with all of this posturing you seize what is rightfully mine.

“You have done me great injury, Robert di Caela!” he screamed, and I heard the sound of something else shattering.

“But nothing . . .”

His voice descended into quiet, into a cheerful, commonplace tone that was more frightening by far than the screaming of a moment before.

“Nothing compared to the injury I shall do you.”

Sir Robert cried out in rage. I heard the sound of furniture falling. I burrowed out toward the light and peeked through the blankets just in time to see the Scorpion wheel away from a charging Sir Robert and sprint for the door my brother Brithelm blocked. Halfway to the door he paused, wheeled once more in his tracks, and quickly, with a strange, awkward gait like a grounded raptor, leaped toward the broken window and out, his cloak catching and tearing on a jagged claw of glass near the base of the sill.

Bayard sprang to the window and looked out and down. He turned back to us and shrugged.

“Disappeared from the face of the earth,” he declared flatly.

Sir Robert drew his sword and split the back of the one chair standing upright in the room.

Brithelm sat on the edge of the bed and chattered as I stood by the fireplace and tuned the lute he had brought me.

“What a wonderful stroke of fortune, was it not, that the one most capable of taking care of you in your illness was your long-lost brother, with whom you you had reunited only an hour or so before you needed him direly?”

“Yes, Brithelm,” I responded tactfully, politely. “I’d have to say there was tremendous good fortune all around in this matter. Is this”—referring to the lute—”in tune?”

“I am sure it’s in tune with something, little brother. I do not believe it’s in tune with itself.”

I sighed and returned to tuning, following the old gnomish philosophy: “When in doubt about the pitch, tighten the string.”

“What’s keeping you here, anyway, Brithelm?” I asked. “I thought you were secluded for good, intent on becoming some kind of swamp saint.”

He shifted on the bed, stood, and walked toward the fireplace, where he stood by me, warming his hands at the red coals.

“Seclusion it was, little brother, but I had to return to the world in order to answer a brother in need.

“I am here as a character reference for Alfric in his suit for the hand of the Lady Enid di Caela,” Brithelm announced serenely, and a string broke as I tuned it far too tightly, whined and ricocheted and whipped against my hand. Brithelm started at the noise.

“Character reference? For Huma’s sake, Brithelm, it’s nearly impossible to find any character in our brother, much less to vouch for it. How in the world did he wrangle you into such a business?”

I stared hard at Brithelm.

“Well, I could tell that all his talk of heroics was only talk, but after all, Father had sent him. Alfric told me that the prospect of being wed to the Lady Enid dwelt with him night and day. He appealed to Father to perform the emergency Knighthood ceremony, which, of course, allowed him to enter the tournament—”

“Wait a moment, Brithelm. ‘The emergency Knighthood ceremony’?”

“You know more about it than I do, Galen. You studied the Solamnic codes while I turned to theology.

“But isn’t the ceremony a dispensation that the Order grants on the eve of a tournament in which the husband of a daughter of an Early Family is to be chosen? Young lads not yet squires but intending to be are allowed to forego squire-hood altogether, moving straight to the ceremony which Father performed in our absence at the moat house, making Alfric a Knight and thereby eligible to marry Enid di Caela.”

“Is that what Alfric told you about the ceremony, Brithelm?”

It was simply the worst lie I had ever heard—not the most cruel, the most base, the most foul, but surely the most stupid. There were a dozen places within this castle—as many as there were Knights—where Brithelm could turn and discover there was no such thing as an “emergency Knighthood ceremony.” Something was approaching shore in Alfric’s brain. Swimming in loneliness, that half-drowned idea had sight of land.

With all my enemies on the loose, it might have been foolish to travel abroad that night, but travel I did. It was no problem skirting the keep of the castle, asking a servant the whereabouts of a private place to sit and ponder.

Of course, when the Scorpion leaped through the window and vanished, none of us thought we were out of the woods, especially after Bayard and I recounted our history of encounters with the Scorpion—how each time he had vanished mysteriously, only to return in a new and equally deadly form. When I told Sir Robert of the Scorpion’s threats to the life of the Lady Enid, the old man flooded the courtyard of Castle di Caela with armed guards.

You couldn’t walk, sit, or stand in the moonlight without being accosted by overly concerned protectors—by a “who goes there?” followed with a barrage of questions that dissected your business at the castle and your further business walking around at night, questions that traced your family tree back five generations with the genuine possibility that any ancestor remotely un-Solamnic might get you a night in the guardhouse. Which is why the orchard was a pleasant change. I had set up camp there, amidst the peach and pear trees beneath the Lady Enid’s window.

Guards surrounded the orchard from a distance, and now and again I heard one of them call to another. But the Lady Enid’s orchard was her own private preserve, evidently, and after a thorough search in the early evening, the guards had left it alone. Only an hour after nightfall, it was filled with nightingales and owls, singing their old quarrel from the trees.

Not only were there singing birds, but birds wrought of evergreen, too. The floor of the orchard was a topiary garden, filled with carefully tended shrubbery sculpted into the forms of various small animals and birds. Owls there were, and nightingales, and squirrels and rabbits and short-eared lutra, all cut from juniper, aeterna, and other greenery.

For a while I stood there, staring up at the dim and flickering light in Enid’s window and breathing in the strong, fresh smells of the fruit and the shrubbery. It was a romantic’s dream, this landscape, spoiled only by the occasional distant calling of a guard.

I backed against a juniper owl, pausing to relish the smells, the sound of birdsong, the soft light. Suddenly there were hands about my throat and a coarse, familiar voice hissing in my ear.

“I have a lot of paying back to do, little brother. And it starts here.”

It seems Alfric had followed me out of the entrance and around the keep, staying hidden under the branches of the trees and in the shadows of the walls. My face was half-buried in the back of the topiary owl.

“Please let me up,” I muttered, my mouth pressed against needles and hard wood.

“Like you let me up back in the swamp? Oh . . . I have a mind to throttle you, Weasel, to make you burrow face down in the greenery. How do the needles taste, little brother? Where is the wisdom hiding now?”

Nonetheless, his grip loosened and I gained room to speak.

Letting me speak had always been Alfric’s mistake.

“I said, better let me up, Alfric. If you mash or otherwise alter this familiar face, Sir Bayard won’t have you as a squire. Nor will any of these other gentlemen gathered here, if anything deflects the splendor of my nose.”

“Which don’t seem bad to me, Galen, seeing as I plan to be suiting for the hand of the Lady Enid,” Alfric announced proudly, pressing me even farther into the evergreen.

“It’s ‘suing,’ and I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Tournament’s over, remember?”

After one more shove into the thick needles of the bush, Alfric let me up.

“My luck may be out, but there’s something about that weasel’s luck of yours that keeps you landing upright.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’re here to press my suit. That’s your story,” Alfric growled. He put his hand over my mouth, muffling my cries for help. Then he grabbed my right arm, twisting it behind me until my elbow touched the base of my spine, my thumb the back of my neck. I tried for a witty response, but could think of none through the pain that tore into my shoulder and blotted out wit, blotted out everything but the sense of that pain. I was having trouble breathing.

“What is my motivation, dear brother?” I gasped, and prepared to black out.

“The swamp,” said Alfric. “Remember the swamp?”

“Oh.”

“I have heard tales of your confession, Weasel, but omitted by chance—by oversight, I’m sure—is the part where you stranded your older brother in deadly muck and mire. A most convenient oversight, no doubt, for we all know that violence against one’s blood relatives is the worst transgression of Solamnic code. I do not think Sir Bayard and Sir Robert could overlook such a, shall we say, naughty piece of business? What do you think, dear brother?”

An excruciating pause. “At—your—service,” I stammered, gasping for breath.

Alfric loosened his grip. Air and sense rushed back into me as my brother leaned above me and whispered.

“Good. I brung the lute. Now what’re we going to do, Galen? You’re good at these things.”

He spun me about, pulled me up to his face, and drew his dagger, and I remembered the smell of my brother that was the smell of wine and of old food and of something that tunneled to the edge of insanity always beneath those other smells.

Alfric pressed the point of the knife against my chin, inflicting slight but menacing pain. Then he lowered me and took cover, drawing me roughly after him into the breast of the shrubbery owl.

“Everything is close to perfect,” Alfric crowed. “I was late to the tournament, so I did not have to join the lists against anyone who would of mangled me in the first place. Then it turns out that the Knight who wins and I’m planning to be the squire for is a crook and did not win at all, and for a while I’m even madder at you because you kept me from being a squire again. But then I think it’s even better on account of now the tournament don’t matter and the Lady Enid and her inheritance are fair game.”

“Fair game! What a . . . romantic way to put it, Alfric.”

“That’s up to you,” my brother hissed. “You’re better at putting things than I am. You tell me what to say underneath the Lady Enid’s window. You play the lute and sing like you was me.

“If you don’t,” Alfric said, flatly and casually, “I am going to kill you.”

As we had grown up in the tunnels and chambers of the moat house, each of us had dreamed of killing the other, I am sure. I can speak with authority that I often went woolgathering over Alfric’s untimely death. I would fancy it at night as I lay in my chambers, or in the daytime in my secret place behind the hearth of the great hall. It usually involved large, hungry animals with fangs.

But we were too old for the old threats, the bluster of “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you” that underscored our militant childhoods. This time, Alfric might mean it.

“You better do good, Weasel,” Alfric whispered.

He loosened his grip and pushed me completely into the belly of the owl. He dusted himself off, then licked his fingers and ran them through his hair like a grotesque, makeshift comb. He stepped into a clearing in the topiary, lit dimly by the stars and the firelight from Enid’s window and other windows on this side of the keep. I was allowed to woo, but from the wings only.

“Hello, Lady Enid,” Alfric called up to the window. He looked back to me at once for advice or approval.

“Wonderful!” I whispered from the belly of the owl.

Alfric smiled stupidly and turned back to his courtship.

A small sound rose from the window—a muffled sound that I took as laughter, but Alfric, buoyed by what he thought was his own silver tongue, no doubt took as a sigh of adoration.

But he had no idea what to say next. He stepped away from the window, looked at me, panic-stricken. I scrambled out from under the owl’s wing, hoping to put shadows between me and my brother—shadows through which I could escape and return to my quarters. That way I could be at peace, and Alfric—well, Alfric could pursue the courtship of his lifetime with what talents he had. Left to his own charm and resources, my brother might make a four-hundred-year-old curse seem attractive.

Overhead, slate gray clouds scudded over the moons and shaded and shifted the light around us. Alfric followed me, losing me only a moment behind the light blue needles of an enormous aeterna jay. He found me again soon enough, catching sight of me as I turned to run and finally cornering me against a larick nest of sparrows, who rustled and dropped their berries when Alfric grabbed me by the shoulders and began to shake me pleadingly.

“You don’t know how hard it is to be the eldest, Weasel, to have so many responsibilities fall into your lap simply because you’re the first one out. You have to put up with everything from your younger brothers—mysticism, theft, bad opinions—and you have to do so with a smile because you are the oldest and it has fallen into your lap to put up with those things.”

“Stop shaking me, Alfric.”

“Shut up. I listened to you long and often. But did anyone ever look out for Alfric? Did anyone ever ask what would please Alfric?”

“Well, I . . .”

“Shut up.” His voice was a little too loud. He paused, looked around. “I’m tired of always seeing to the needs of others, of being the concerned big brother. What I would rather do is to win some attention on my own, for once to do something for myself and only for myself.”

A look of pain and fear passed over his face. The scene would have been pathetic had I not known that Alfric’s every waking moment since childhood had been devoted to doing things for himself and only for himself.

“And you are going to help me, little brother. You and your words and mischief and petty larceny,” Alfric gloated, breaking a branch from the larick and waving it irritatingly under my nose. The sharp, minty smell of the red needles almost made me sneeze.

“You see,” Alfric continued, “I am going to step back into that clearing, back by the wall of the keep, where I will be in full view of the Lady Enid. From there I can pay court to her. Make me up a poem to say to her, Weasel.”

Suddenly he dragged me by my collar back beneath Enid’s window, where he held me at arm’s length, dangling in the midst of a juniper nightingale, a rather woolly overgrown thing crouched beneath one of the taller pear trees.

I took refuge while Alfric stood in the clearing, in partial view, romanced by moonlight and shadows. He stood there—and I dangled there—for a good minute of silence, until I realized he was waiting for Enid to come to the window.

“She’s not going to show, Alfric, unless you let her know that you’re out here.”

I choked and coughed as my collar tightened. Still he suspended me among the evergreens.

“Return to the window, my lady,” I whispered.

“What?”

“‘Return to the window, my lady.’ That’s your first line.” I grabbed a branch in the midst of the shrub and, settling part of my weight upon it, took some of the pressure off my neck.

“I don’t understand,” Alfric muttered. One hand held me even more tightly among the needles and the branches while the other scratched his head.

“You wanted a poem, Alfric. I am obliging you with the first line.”

“I forgot what it was.”

“‘Return to the window, my lady,’ damn it!”

“‘Return to the window, my lady, damn it!’” he called aloud beneath Enid’s window. There was silence. A faint light shook deep in the chambers, glancing off the uppermost branches of the tree. Alfric looked toward me, awaiting the next line. I dangled and composed rapidly.

“While the garden dances with light.”

“What?”

“Your second line,” I explained. “‘While the garden dances with light.’”

“You sure she will want to hear about a garden?” Alfric whispered. “Don’t girls want to hear about themselves?”

“In a minute, brother,” I replied, sliding away from his hand, crawling into the branches of the nightingale.

“Meanwhile, you want to set the mood. It’s what the poets call ‘creating atmosphere.’ ”

Alfric stared into the shrubbery bird, looking long and mistrustfully for me. Finally he gave up, turned back to the window, spoke aloud.

“‘While the garden dances with light.’”

A stifled sound descended from the chamber window.

Laughter? Who could tell?

I composed for a moment in silence, then prompted my brother.

“While the moon glides low in the evening sky, borne aloft in the hands of the night.”

“What?”

“For Huma’s sake, Alfric, open your ears and listen to what you’re saying! It’s not Quivalen Sath, but it does for topiary romance!”

He turned, faced the window, and spoke loudly.

“While the moon gets low in the evening, and something happens at night.”

I didn’t think the line was that bad, but it turned poisonous in Alfric’s translation.

“Great, Alfric,” I spat. “That’s just magnificent. You couldn’t win Lexine the cook’s daughter with a display of oratory like that!”

All of a sudden, from the recesses of Enid’s room above us came a scream, loud and frightful and filled with desperation. After the scream died, the keep and the orchard about it were terribly silent. In astonishment Alfric pulled me from the nightingale. He and I stared at one another—that stupid, childhood stare that comes when you have broken something, when you stand there in the aftermath, trying to figure each other: “Is he trustworthy enough that we can conspire in silence?” or “Is he stupid enough that I can blame him entirely for this?”

As we stared, a long silence settled in the shrubbery and shadows around us. The orchard birds that had not grown quiet at Alfric’s poetry grew quiet now at the sound of screaming above them. For above us came the sounds of movement, commotion, and through it all continual screams. I started for the keep wall, somehow intending to scale it, to vault in Enid’s window . . . But Alfric’s hand restrained me. My brother crashed back into the shrubbery nightingale, drawing me with him.

It was this bird that swallowed us—my brother and me—just as Enid’s window filled with shadows. Concealed beneath the shrubbery’s overgrown wings, we watched as if paralyzed as a core of darkness rose out of the large keep window, and as that darkness moved rapidly down the wall.

Across the courtyard it moved, quick in the light of the moons. But neither the red nor the white light could enter its thickness, its opaqueness. Its surface was pocked and dappled like molten wax doused with cold water. From within it I thought I heard screams.

I struggled with the green, fragrant branches around me. Once again I tried to break free of my brother, to storm the keep and rescue the damsel in distress as any good Knight in any old story would be bound to do. But Alfric only clutched me tighter, drawing his knife again and pressing it uncomfortably against my ribs. It was refreshing not to be the most cowardly Pathwarden.

In the shifting light of the moons I saw the shadow rush rapidly toward the gate, and two shouting guardsmen move almost as quickly in a desperate effort to cut it off.

The shadow gathered speed, as though something within it were guiding it, propelling it with an increasing sense of will and of urgency. It struck them with a sharp wet sound, and they fell over. Their screams were unspeakable.

It was then I heard the screams once more, cascading from the window above me. They were no longer stifled, but muffled somehow, as if whoever was screaming was a great distance away and the sound was reaching me from afar and far too late.

Gradually the shadow grew smaller and smaller as it passed through the gate in the outer walls of the castle and from there moved toward the plains, in what direction I had no idea.

“Alfric!” I called aloud. There was no sound behind me but that of branches breaking, of sobbing, of something large and clumsy crashing away into the darkness.

“Damn it!” I muttered, and turned to follow my brother. I was stopped by the screams from above me. When I remember it, it seems the most foolish thing I had done, at least until then. Why, helping the Scorpion steal the armor seemed like an act of genius next to this.

I grabbed the trellised vines against the wall of the tower and climbed up to the Lady Enid’s window, where I heaved myself over the sill and toppled inside.

Dannelle di Caela lay screaming, bound on the bed, a vacancy beyond terror on her face. It was clear to me now that the Lady Enid was being carried from Castle di Caela in shadows, toward what murky destination and for what reason only the gods knew.

But I knew that somewhere in the days ahead the Scorpion would make good his most deadly threat. It was all I could do to get to the base of the southeast tower, more than I could do to climb the stairs that encircled it from the outside. Nonetheless, I climbed the stairs, stopping to gain my breath twice, three times, wondering how Mariel di Caela ever got all those cats to this altitude, and filled with a rising sense of despair that despite climbing a topless tower, I would not see what I hoped so devoutly to see. I was nearly to the top of the southeast tower when the spiraling stairwell gave me a view of the plains to the east of the castle. I stood on tiptoe, squinted, and cast my gaze to the limits of the horizon. Where the red light of Lunitari shone on a dark shadow moving quickly toward the Throtyl Gap. And beyond to the gods knew where.