The Hidden Stars Part 21

All along the road they continued to meet homeless travelers. As this was a far less hospitable region, these were poorer people, most often met walking hungry and footsore, carrying no more than a basket or a sack, having less to take with them and far less to lose-yet for all that they plodded on grim-faced, bleary-eyed, sometimes mute with grief at leaving their rocky little hillside villages, their tiny sod houses and meager gardens.

Those who could speak and answer Kivik's questions had no news to give him of the marshals. Yet, more and more often, he heard mention of a certain name: Tirfang. The stories of the refugees varied, but all had a common theme: those without kin or clan to the west or the south were slowly making their way toward the Old Fortress, the Haunted Fortress at Tirfang in the Drakenskaller Mountains.

One afternoon, when the scouts were ranging even farther ahead than usual, a group of them came upon three old women, rattling down a narrow, rutted track in a ramshackle cart pulled by a team of six white goats.

Three wilder-looking, uncannier women had seldom been seen: two short and stout, remarkably similar, with twinkling little black-beetle eyes; the other tall, bony, ancient past reckoning, with a ma.s.s of windblown white hair, and a face as old as the summer stars.

There was something uncanny, too, about the goats, with their wicked white faces and slotted yellow eyes, their ridged horns and cloven hooves-though how and wherein that strangeness might lie it was difficult to say.

No, said the women, all three, when the scouts stopped to question them, they had no rumors to pa.s.s on about the movements of armies. "But if you are, as I think, Prince Kivik's men," added the crone, waving a skinny finger, "it is possible we may be able to tell him something to his advantage."

One of the scouts hurried back to the Prince bearing their message. "They say they are runestone readers, going to live with a great-granddaughter or a great-grand-niece who lives west of the Nisse. But they have offered to cast runes on your behalf, if you desire it."

Kivik drew in a quick breath. For the first time in many days he felt a faint stirring of hope.

There had been a time when runestone readers were as common in the north as wizards and mages in the south; now they were a dying breed. A man would be a fool who pa.s.sed up the opportunity to consult not just one but three old women who claimed to know the art; a man in Kivik's situation who declined would be three times a fool.

"Tell them-tell them that they will be very welcome. Say that they honor us," he instructed the scout. Then he gave orders to set up a temporary camp, erect his green silk pavilion, and a.s.semble such refreshments as might be found suitable for such distinguished visitors.

A wave of excited speculation ran through the army as the word spread. Curiosity was rampant, and many would have given much for an invitation to observe the casting of the runes.

Winloki was one of the envied few whom Kivik summoned. She arrived outside the green pavilion riding pillion behind Skerry, with her arms around his waist and her heart beating fast with antic.i.p.ation. As she slid down to the ground, landing lightly on her feet, she wondered if these chance-met women could possibly be what they claimed. She knew that fewer and fewer were born to the gift with every pa.s.sing year, and that even those with extraordinary talents had difficulty finding teachers capable of instructing them.

She thought, It is likely that Kivik sent for me with just that in mind. He thinks that I will sense their power if they have it, or tell him they are less than they seem, if they don't.

Then the crowd parted, the goat cart clattered to a stop outside the tent, and the three aged seeresses climbed over the side and lowered themselves stiffly to the ground.

They were ragged and unkempt, there was no denying that. Yet Winloki instinctively sank down into a deep curtsy as the gangling figure of the crone hobbled past, followed by the dark-eyed twins. She was only dimly aware that her legs were shaking, that tears stung her eyes. These women had power-elemental as the powers of the bone ring, and to Winloki just as mysterious.

Kivik feted them with the last of the honey wine. Offering them seats on three elaborately carved camp stools in the green shade of the pavilion, he plied them with a salad of crayfish and wild cress, with blackberries and cream, with a cold soup flavored with mushrooms, and boiled eggs served in their sh.e.l.ls. It was the best he could do on such short notice, a much better meal than he and his captains had enjoyed for many a day.

But when the meal was over, the oldest of the three women told Kivik that an accurate casting of the runes required that the rite be performed in the open air, under the sky.

"As you wish, Grandmother," he replied politely. Rising to his feet, he offered her his own arm to lean on as he escorted her out of the pavilion, through the curious crowd that had gathered outside, and beyond the camp.

Privately, Kivik thought she was the oddest-certainly the oldest-old woman he had ever seen. She was dressed all in rags and tatters, and her hair, which hung down in dirty white elflocks, looked as though the wind had braided it; she brought with her a distinctive odor of rain, woodsmoke, wet earth, and burnt porridge. The ancient twin sisters stumping along behind were just as bizarre, but they lacked her presence and her sharp-nosed, bony, long-legged dignity.

About a hundred yards from the encampment, the women stopped, formed a circle facing each other, and groaning with the effort, all three crouched down in the dust.

The crone spat in the palm of her hand, then drew a wobbly circle and some other signs in the dirt with a gnarled finger. Then, reaching inside her layers of rags, she produced a surprising number of items: a handful of salt, a milkweed pod, a piece of charcoal, a gla.s.s bead, a fragment of bone, and a small hard k.n.o.b of some coa.r.s.e, dark bread.

"Here is sea, wind, fire, and earth," she intoned, placing each item in turn within the circle. "Here is the flesh that feeds us, and the grain that sustains us." She wove a symbol in the air with a motion of her fingers.

One of the twins pa.s.sed her a handful of polished pebbles: quartz, amber, obsidian, beryl, and agate. Every stone had at least three faces, and on every face a different symbol had been scratched or painted.

And so began the casting of the runes: the crone threw the stones into the circle; they made little puffs of dust in the air as they landed. She was a long time studying the symbols, the patterns they made, and which of her marks they fell closest to in the dirt. Then, wordlessly, she gathered up the pebbles and dropped them into the open hand of the woman on her right.

So it went for some time, in utter silence; the stones pa.s.sing from hand to hand countersunwise; the cast, the intense frowning scrutiny; the stones gathered up and dropped into the hand of the next seeress. Kivik had an uneasy impression that not one of them liked what she saw, but it was not until the third time around that he finally realized, with a p.r.i.c.kling across his skin, what it was that troubled them.

Impossibly, the stones fell in the exact same pattern, the same symbols uppermost, every time they landed.

The crone glanced up, met Kivik's eyes across the circle. She shook her head. "There is some strong magic at work," she said in her cracked voice. "It confuses the signs. Still, if you wish, we will try again."

She rubbed out and redrew the circle and the other marks in the dirt, then performed the same ritual as before, with the charcoal, the gla.s.s bead, and the other items. Muttering something under her breath that Kivik could not quite hear, she tossed the pebbles into the still, hot air. When they landed, a glance was enough to tell her that the result was exactly the same as it had been nine times before. With a snort of disgust, she swept the stones into her hand, and pa.s.sed them over to the twin on her right.

Three times around, and it all happened the same way again. The toss, the scowl, the gathering up, and the pa.s.sing on.

"It is no use," said the crone, at last. "The barbarians have cast some mighty spell."

Kivik knotted both of his hands into fists; he felt a trickle of sweat go down his side. A man who considered himself of more importance in the world might decide that the whole world was against him. "What kind of spell?"

"It is a spell of confusion and misdirection, my Prince-on you and those with you, most certainly, and perhaps on the friends that you seek. It continually leads you off in the wrong direction; you circle each other and never meet; the roads lead you astray."

Slowly, painfully, she rose to her feet. "While it lasts you will never find each other. At least not so long as you keep moving."

A short while later, Kivik sat in his pavilion, having a.s.sembled there the men he trusted most. Skerry straddled an armor chest on his right, while his other captains stood weary and disheartened in their tattered surcoats and their dull, heavy mail, in a semicircle before him.

"If we are to believe what we have been told-and speaking for myself I don't doubt a word of it-our plight is even worse than we imagined," he began. "The question now is, what do we plan to do about it?"

There was a subdued murmur, dying away to silence. Kivik waited for a time, hoping that someone would speak up, either with questions or suggestions, but as it became evident that no one would, he continued: "We left Luckenborg with a clear purpose: to bring supplies and reinforcements to the marshals. Much has changed since then. Our numbers are depleted; we have more women and children, old men and wounded, than we have men capable of fighting. Weakened as we are, what help could we bring to anyone? Even if we did find Hialli and the rest, which it becomes increasingly plain that we can't."

There was another long silence, everyone standing or sitting with eyes downcast, as if pondering the futility of their situation.

At last Skerry cleared his throat. "The old woman did say that we would never find our friends while we keep moving. But if we could find a strong place to hold, send messages to the King, then wait for someone-either the marshals, or the army your father has been mustering since we left-if we could wait for them to find us, then we might cirumvent this sorcery of the Eisenlonders.

"At the very least, we would buy some time to heal our wounded and train some of the older lads among the refugees."

Several men nodded; there was a slight leavening of the heaviness in the tent. But then one of the captains gave a bitter laugh.

"That sounds very well-very well indeed. Only where are we to find such a place? By all accounts, every town in the Haestfilke has been put to the torch, and even if there is a town with walls still standing, even if we could get there, the Eisenlonders would still come along sooner or later and burn us out. We never prepared ourselves for this kind of warfare; we have built all our walls of wood."

"There is-" Kivik began, then stopped. He sat contemplating the toes of his boots for several minutes, then blurted it out all in a rush: "There is such a place, Deor, a place of high stone walls. The refugees have been talking of little else for many days now; some of our people will be there already. The marshals may be there, for all that we know. I never thought to go there, but..." His voice died.

He saw the knowledge dawn in several pairs of eyes at once; faces paled, breaths bated. Skerry changed his position on the armor trunk, and Deor gave another incredulous laugh.

"You are speaking of the Old Fortress at Tirfang! With all respect, my prince, shall we make alliance with ghosts and dead sorcerers?"

Kivik sighed. It was true that the fortress at Tirfang had an evil name. It had been built in the days of the legendary Witch Lords, who had ruled over all these lands during some dim prehistoric epoch long before the rise of Alluinn in the south, long before the Three Tribes became three separate nations of Skyrra, Arkenfell, and Mistlewald, and the distant grandfathers of Ristil's people crossed the Necke, settling all the country west of Eisenlonde.

"According to legend," said Skerry, softly, consideringly, "the walls at Tirfang are impossible to breach. They stand thirty ells high on every side-more than three times as tall as the walls of the Heldenhof! There are seven strong gates in seven mighty gatehouses before you even reach the inner courtyards and the great fortified keep. According to legend, it has moats, drawbridges, arrow slots, murder holes: never before or since has a fortress been built so admirably suited for defense."

"And yet, for all these advantages, no one has ever succeeded in holding Tirfang during a siege." This came from a grey-haired veteran of many border skirmishes, by the name of Regin. "Not once in a thousand years, according to legend."

Kivik sat chewing on a broken fingernail, thinking that over. Whether the Old Fortress fell by treachery or some deadly disease that struck down the defenders from within, by some spell of magic gone wrong or through some other mischance, whoever defended Tirfang had always failed. People said the fortress was haunted, that there was a curse on the place, a bane of black misfortune of peculiar strength and malevolence.

And yet it was all so long ago. Who knows, really, how much of that history is even true? Our people had never even seen these lands when those walls were raised.

"How far is it to Tirfang?" he asked aloud. "Does anyone here know?"

"Maybe three days, with the wagons and all," said the chief of the scouts. "The horses would find it a steep pull most of the way."

"I think we would be wise to make for Tirfang," offered the practical Skerry. "These stories we've all heard-nursemaids tell them, and small children allow themselves to be frightened. But if they are not outright untruths, they may be wildly exaggerated." He seemed to gain greater certainty as he spoke. "It must be so, if the people who live closest and know it best are suddenly flocking there."

The Prince saw doubtful faces all around him, and some of the men fingered talismans they wore on leather thongs around their necks or set into the hilts of their swords. But these were made to guard against ordinary bad luck; they offered a very frail defense against the ghosts of ancient sorcerers.

He believed that he knew these men well: their hardihood, their courage, their loyalty. He also knew that it is one thing for a man to show himself fearless facing a foe that he understands, even believing himself overmatched, quite another to face terrors he can scarcely comprehend.

But a place to rest and lick our wounds, to recover our strength... That idea was difficult to resist. Kivik himself was bruised in every part of his body after falling from his horse during the last battle, and most of the others gathered in the tent had similar injuries, too minor to take to the healers, too painful to ignore entirely.

Meanwhile, Deor seemed to be reconsidering his position. "Those who built Tirfang were, by all accounts, a wicked, treacherous, and b.l.o.o.d.y people, but what of that? Most of the homes destroyed by the Eisenlonders were made by honest, hardworking, decent folk, yet that made no difference one way or the other."

"But our people aren't sorcerers," retorted Regin.

Skerry made an impatient gesture. "How long can evil inhabit a place after the people who brought it there are dead and gone?"

But that, thought Kivik, is just what n.o.body here knows. In the days when we swore friendship with the wizards of the south, we might have known the answers to such questions. But now there are far too many things we simply don't understand anymore. And that being so, how are we-how am I to make any rational decision?

"It is growing late," he said, rising from his seat, and shifting his shoulders where the armor lay heavily on bruised flesh and strained muscles. "I see no reason to break camp, only to have to set up again in another hour or two. And if we are going nowhere tonight...let us sleep on this question."

There was a mumbled protest here and there, but it lacked fire, it lacked conviction.

He thought, By morning, the idea will have taken hold with more of them. And those who are against it now, they will be growing used to it. If I make up my mind that we will go there, I doubt anyone will try to persuade me otherwise.

In the morning, the word went like wildfire through the camp. Kivik had scarcely made his decision before everyone seemed to know of it: "We go to the Old Fortress at Tirfang. That is a strong place, and the Prince is determined to hold it."

Kivik himself was somewhat taken aback by the sudden wave of enthusiasm that spread like a contagion, banishing all misgiving. Any curse that had lasted for more than ten centuries must be losing its strength by now (everyone said); any walls that had stood even longer than that must be strong indeed. They all packed up their tents with unprecedented dispatch and departed in almost a holiday mood.

For a day and a half they followed an ancient track through the foothills, then up to the skirts of the Drakenskaller Mountains.

Once they left the hills behind, they came upon a meandering mountain road that rose gently at first, then grew steadily steeper. The way soon became so narrow and the climb so difficult, the column began to string out. The wagons and those who traveled on foot fell farther and farther behind, until the Prince sent men back to ride as a rear guard, and to urge on anyone who showed signs of flagging.

A damp wind came down the throat of the pa.s.s, laden with scents of pine and cedar, the promise of snow. The cliff wall rose sheer on one side, and on the other was broken by rocky ledges and terraces, by slopes only a little less precipitous, where hardy alpine plants had rooted in the scree.

Kivik thought that country magnificent, but very bleak. From a practical standpoint, it offered little in the way of forage, and he could only hope the stories were true of wide high meadows in the vicinity of the fortress, where the ancient Witch Lords had grazed their beautiful black steeds. But, regardless, he liked to listen to the high, eerie wailing of the wind among the rocks, the sound of stony waters running in narrow channels. There was a grandeur about it that spoke to his soul.

The mountain walls rose higher and higher, blocking out more and more of the sky. By the second night, Kivik could only see a handful of stars directly overhead.

The next day the winds blew shriller and colder, and even those most eager to reach the fortress began to lose heart. Meanwhile, the horses, not accustomed to these ever-climbing roads that twisted and turned up the walls of mountain gorges, had taken up a wearisome, jogging gait, very difficult to endure. It was beginning to feel as though the journey would never come to an end.

26.

How do we even know that these wraiths mean to do what they say?" asked Prince Ruan, clearly aghast on receiving the news that Sinderian now carried, on a cord around her neck, a linen bag filled with battlefield earth and spirits of the dead. "And if you take them to Skyrra only to learn that they have very different intentions from what they have promised you, what are we supposed to do then?"

"Ghosts are very seldom devious," Sinderian replied-with rather more confidence than she actually felt. "They only remain bound to the earth because of some overmastering pa.s.sion, some absolutely compelling purpose. That usually fills them quite up, so that they have no room for anything else."

If the Prince was very far from mollified, in the end there was nothing he could do. The wraiths were already in Sinderian's possession, she was determined to keep them, and she had neither asked for Ruan's pardon nor his permission.

As for Aell and Jago, they were no less astonished than they were unnerved, yet they seemed to regard these dealings with the dead as quite within a wizard's ordinary business-or at least, not anything the two of them wished to know about. To Sinderian's relief, they scarcely spoke a word on the subject over breakfast, and continued silent when it came time to saddle up the horses and take to the road again.

After a few more days of travel, everyone began to smell the sea. Huge flocks of skua-gulls beat white wings in the sky overhead, and the water in all the little streams along the way became increasingly brackish, then finally undrinkable.

On the last day of the month of Duilligir, they crested a hill and caught their first glimpse of the bustling seaside town of Aurvang inside its ma.s.sive timber walls, and of the blue-grey waters of the Necke, sparkling in the distance.

All the ways of Aurvang twist and turn, and all the buildings have high-peaked roofs in order to shed snow during the winter. Because of this, many of the courts and alleys near the center of town are dark and overshadowed winter and summer, existing in a perpetual twilight.

In later years, it would become a great center for trade, drawing merchants from ports as far distant as Tirhene and Pehlidor, and if in these days it was far less crowded and considerably less sophisticated than it was destined to be, it was still a busy and colorful place.

"We won't be such pariahs here," said Prince Ruan, eyeing with approval the guildhalls and warehouses, the forges and workshops lining the streets, the market square filled with stalls and carts and wheelbarrows selling such varied items as eggs and live poultry, fleeces, embroidered cloth, lodestone, tin kettles, baskets, pins, and gingerbread. "There are foreigners here every bit as exotic as we are."

In the gathering dusk they rode toward the harbor, where tall masts of many ships loomed dark against a sunset sky. Gradually, the streets became more and more empty. At last, pa.s.sing by a humble little inn not far from the water, a spill of firelight through an open door and the savory scent of cooking beckoned Sinderian and her friends in. At the thought of a civilized meal her stomach growled. She felt suddenly faint with hunger and antic.i.p.ation.

As she dismounted in the inn yard, the falcon, who had ridden on her shoulder since they first entered the town, flapped his wings, soared into the air, and disappeared into the windy night.

I will know where to find you in the morning. It seems I no longer care for roofs and walls and firelit rooms, spoke Faolein in her mind.

Leaving Aell and Jago to stable the horses, Sinderian followed Ruan through the open door and into a smoky room. Ropes of onions and dried apples hung from the beamed ceiling; a side of beef sizzled on a spit inside an enormous fireplace; and something that smelled like mulled wine was bubbling in a cauldron.

Soon, they were all seated at a long, scarred table, squeezed in between two traders from Weye and a party of travelers from Mistlewald, eating pease porridge, mutton pies, smoked salmon, new cheese, and baked pears. After the privations of the road, it seemed like a feast.

As she chewed, Sinderian listened with half an ear to the conversations going on all around her. The babble of different dialects and accents confused her, perhaps because she was more than half asleep. In any case, it all sounded exactly like the type of stories-exaggerated, contradictory, fantastical-one might hear in dockside taverns or hostels anywhere.

I will sort it all out in the morning, she promised herself.

Soon after that, she stumbled upstairs to the room and the bed she was to share with three other women. Slipping out of her stained and threadbare gown, she stood by the open window in her patched linen shift, drinking in the scents of sea and night.

Then she tucked the bag of earth inside the neck of her shift and crawled under the blankets with her already snoring bedfellows. Stuffed with p.r.i.c.kly straw and none too clean, the mattress was nevertheless welcome to one whose only couch had been the ground for so many weeks.

Her last thought before sliding into sleep was, Only a few days more and we will be in Skyrra. The longest and hardest part of our journey is over.

But it was not to prove nearly so easy, as they learned the next day, and those stories Sinderian had been so ready to dismiss when she heard them recounted in a room reeking of pipeweed and the stale fumes of ale became at once more believable and sinister when repeated on the midday street.

In truth, the whole town was buzzing with tales of sea serpents and giant eels, of ghost ships and maelstroms fifty-sixty-a hundred miles across. As Sinderian and her friends were to learn after tramping for hours upon hours along the docks trying to find a shipmaster willing to carry them across the channel.

"There aren't many reckless enough to hazard that crossing in these times," said one sea captain, a heavyset man with a shock of grey hair. "Most of us think it dangerous enough to sail up and down the coast-and we wouldn't do that if it wasn't our livelihood. No, keep your coin," he added, as the Prince drew out his purse. "Even if I thought it worth the risk, I could never find a crew."

It was the same answer whomever they approached, and that answer was too often accompanied by hard, suspicious glances, or a string of oaths that made Prince Ruan flush to the eyebrows and finger the hilt of his sword.

"Perhaps we will find someone who is willing tomorrow," said Sinderian, as she and the Prince, and the two men-at-arms, returned to the inn at sunset. "New ships come in every day."

But the next morning nothing had changed. By afternoon, they had stopped looking for a ship and were combing the docks for any owner of a fishing boat valiant enough or venial enough to make the voyage.

"We might buy a boat and sail it across ourselves," Ruan suggested at last. He himself had often sailed in his boy-hood, while Aell had spent all the years of his youth either rigging the sails or hauling in the nets, on a fishing boat belonging to his father and his older brothers.