Isaiah pulled the horse to a halt in the middle of the afternoon, when they were five or six days’ journey from Hairekeep.
Hereward, who had been dozing against his back, jerked into wakefulness. “Isaiah?”
“Wait there,” Isaiah said, swinging a leg over the stallion’s withers and sliding to the ground.
Hereward slid off as well, one hand grabbing at the halter and rope that Isaiah had fashioned out of the harness he had made.
Someone was sitting cross-legged in the sand some twenty paces away, their head bent over the sword they were honing.
Isaiah was already walking toward the man, but Hereward did not follow.
Whatever waited there looked too dangerous.
Isaiah stopped several paces away.
“Bingaleal,” he said, although he knew that the creature sitting on the ground before him was not in any manner the Lealfast he had known.
Bingaleal—or whatever he had become—looked up from his task. In features he looked as Isaiah remembered, but his eyes had been replaced with vivid emerald glass.
“Isaiah,” Bingaleal said, then bent his head back to honing the sword.
“What do you want, Bingaleal?” Isaiah said.
Bingaleal’s right hand moved down the blade of the sword, slowly and rhythmically, running the whetting stone over the cutting edge of the steel. It made a slow, whispering sound that grated on Isaiah’s nerves.
“Bingaleal?” Isaiah said.
Bingaleal looked up again, and Isaiah heard Hereward’s very soft gasp as she saw the creature’s eyes.
“I have a message for you,” said Bingaleal. “From the One.”
“I grow sick of his messages,” Isaiah said. “They prove a heavy burden.”
Bingaleal grinned, and now Isaiah gasped in unison with Hereward.
Within Bingaleal’s mouth there was nothing but blackness, and within that blackness, hands pressing forth in agony and terror.
“Take a good look at Hairekeep as you pass,” Bingaleal said, “and know what awaits Elcho Falling should Maximilian think to ignore the One.”
Then he rose, making Isaiah take an involuntary step back, and strode off into the distance.
When Isaiah returned to Hereward, she looked at him with worried eyes. “Who was that?” she said.
“Dismay and disaster,” he replied.