Would you credit that, after Ragnor and his Haxyx rowed their hearts out to get us through the gale, we sat for six priceless hours while the Tistyr commander signaled Heshruan to be sure we were safe to admit? Quarred is permanently panicky about its border isthmus. Ridiculous, because, as Ragnor says, “If I did come, there’s three hundred miles of coast to beach on. Why would I damn well walk?”
The clearance came at dusk. We hove the gold on a packhorse and ourselves on our beasts. Beryx lifted a hand to Beraza’s blur on the inky water, and said evenly, “Ride.”
I am unlikely to forget that ride. Clear through the night, steering by the stars, up over Heshruan Slief till a huge ember-red dawn found me flogging the packhorse and Beryx flogging himself. I made him rest an hour by lying down and refusing to move. “And if you kick me, I’ll make a song of it.” The packhorse lay down in the absolute height of noon, the whole Slief aquake in the heat and our mouths too dry to hear ourselves curse. We split the gold, turned the horse loose, and rode in search of a steading, which took all afternoon.
They were lavishly kind: fresh packhorse, food and drink, demands that we sleep. Beryx looked at the western sky. In a lilac dusk the new moon hung, slim and cruel as a sliver of steel. He said, “Can’t,” in a whisper, and tottered out to his horse.
Only image-shards remain of that night. Flogging my innocent beast for slowing while I slept. A servant’s arm around me when I woke. Beryx swaying drunkenly, chin on chest, reins knotted round wrist, against a sheaf of stars. Falling off in a wide red cloudless dawn, pulling Beryx after me, insisting, groggy but adamant, “New moon come. No use get there dead.”
Woken with a vile headache, drenched in sweat by the implacable sun, I recall watering the horses in somebody’s earth-tank. Riding on. The Helkents rising higher and higher, a red rampart in the east, and at last the road up to where Quarred and Everran meet. Staggering into the border-post to meet soldiers whose determination ran to drawn swords. Quarred border was closed for the night.
Perhaps it was fortunate, if only for the sake of this song. We slept on the border-post floor. Four, how I slept. As the first sun dyed the Lynghyrne, we were eating stale bread as we climbed to the saddle of the pass.
Thank the Four that Everran does not bother to ward its march. The saddle topped and Bryve Elond engulfed us, a long trough of silvery leaves over twisted stumpy black trunks, our own elonds at last, our own red mountains reared above. Everran, tenuous fawn, filled the V ahead. Beryx looked up, a stick man on a starven horse, and an immense golden-crowned indigo-shadowed thunderhead lit his dreamy smile.
Then he straightened with a jerk. A shape had plummeted from the cloud, so high it was toy-like, a mere blotted silhouette, but one you would never mistake. Four-legged, serpent-backed, winged with sails, trailing a sting of tail.
Next instant Beryx was by the packhorse, snatching the halter as he ripped out words. “Ride! You left, you right. Harran, back down the pass. If it chases you, jump off the horse.” The servants fled. He tore madly at the pack bag and I forced my muscles to slide me down, drive me round to the other side.
He snarled, “Get out! Go!” My fingers shook as I whipped the pack off, tore at the buckles, he ran a few feet and tumbled the gold onto the ground, I copied without knowing why, he slapped his horse savagely on the rump and as it snorted away he snarled again, “You raving idiot—go!” I hit my own horse across the nose—and then it was too late.
Hawge’s circles had grown faster and faster, lower, smaller, tremendous piston wingbeats expressing more than simple rage. Then fire shot from its nostrils and lashed along the ground. The grass ignited, the elonds went up in fiery fusillades. We and the horses and servants were yarded, walled in rails of flame.
Beryx took five paces back from the gold. I found myself at his shoulder. The dragon thundered round its trap, braked with a slam, spun and dropped, right in front of us.
This time it did not waddle. It came like a stalking cat, chin on the ground, spine sunk between the shoulders and then arching up, eyes like burning phosphorus. Only this back rose thirty feet high, the tail that lashed behind covered fifty feet in a sweep, and even the ripple of those huge shoulders was lost behind the lamps of eyes.
Straight over the fire they looked. Straight through the fire they came. They were brighter than the flames. They were bigger than the flames. They were opening, widening, there was nothing left around them, nothing existed but facetted, sentient, thought-obliterating crystal green...
A clear, hard, human voice said, “I have brought your gold.”
My sight cleared with a pop. Hawge was right on top of us, crouched to spring, eyes on a level with mine. Beryx stood unflinching, head up, looking straight back—only later did I remember it—into that deadly gaze.
Hawge snorted. Red-hot derision does not cover it. Flames struck the ground, ricocheted and shot twenty feet in the air.
<Where,> its breath was fire ripping through helliens, <is my fire-stone—Man?>
Beryx spoke clearly, precisely. “I can get it back.”
Hawge hissed: the cut of a giant whip.
“Give me,” Beryx persisted, clearly, steadily, still not looking away, “five days.”
Hawge spat. Then the upper lip lifted in gigantic parody of a human sneer, and the eyes altered from fury to a vicious malevolence.
<Go,> it whispered, <to your—Saphar. But I leave now—to HUNT!>
It leapt straight at and over us with a sixty-foot bound caught in the air by the first colossal wingbeat and driven upward on a roar like a wounded earthquake in its throes.
I stood quaking, knees unstrung, mind a quag of unpent fright. Beryx turned around.
“You fatuous oaf.” His voice came out a note high, with the fine tremor of a fraying string. “You raving imbecile. You utter incompetent! You risked the pair of us! You should have...” he broke off. Walked unsteadily to the roadside, and was violently and comprehensively sick.
He had recovered by the time we caught the horses, whose panic made them nearly as dangerous as Hawge. I helped scoop up the gold. “Bring it along,” he said huskily, struggling astride his beast.
I cried, “Where are you going?” and he looked down at me. His eyes were quite black, but this time it was not rage.
“Saphar,” he said.
* * * * *
Down Ven Elond I just kept him in sight. I was seething with questions: Why had the maerian been unguarded, who could dare to rob a dragon’s den, how was it done, how did he escape, how could Beryx hope to find him if the dragon could not? I had recalled a thick red-crusted slash under Hawge’s right eye. I wanted to know how Beryx had looked in those eyes and not been paralyzed like a mouse, how their conversation had jumped so impossibly and what steps were missed and how Saphar came into it. Aslash, I thought in forlorn hope. Aslash will know.
In Aslash square Beryx slid down, ignored cries, greetings, questions, told the air, “Get me another horse,” and walked straight, as by willpower, toward the governor’s house. The governor met him halfway, his soldier’s aplomb reduced to a frightened mask.
Beryx whispered, “How?”
“Last month the gold ran out. General’s sent messages for you, sir—two, three times a day. The dragon flew two days ago. Came back yesterday. A terrible noise... like the Helkents had fallen down. It flew off. So high we lost touch—”
“Saphar?”
Beryx was just audible. The governor’s voice shook.
“Sir, no one’s been able to raise them since... the dragon flew.”
Beryx turned away. In death itself he will not look like that. The governor caught his arm. “Sir, for the Four’s sake, I’ll send scouts, messengers, you can’t go on like—”
Beryx freed himself as if unconscious of it. “Horse,” he said to the ground. “Now.”
Aslash signaled ahead. We had relays at Khatmel, Tirkeld, Asvelos, we rode in two-thirds of a day what I had managed in two. I covered the last miles neither asleep nor awake, a pair of legs attached to a horse. Whatever sustained Beryx, it was not flesh and blood.
The road dipped, rose, dipped, rose a last time and slid down to Azilien. Our horseshoes thumped on the verge, clattered on the paving. I did not want to think why they were so loud, any more than I wanted to look up.
Beryx rode onto the bridge. Drew rein: and slowly, so slowly, lifted his eyes.
Like the Perfumed Vale, Saphar had been slashed with fire. Smoke still wreathed feebly about its terraces, but it did not conceal the huge welts of ruin that crisscrossed the city, wider than houses, slashing in rubble and embers across streets, ripping contemptuously through walls, burning up chains of thatch, and reducing major buildings to heaps of fallen stone. People moved among the ruins, slowly, aimlessly, in the uncanny quiet. Some looked at me, and looked away: not in rejection but in blank disinterest.
I heard Beryx take a slow, deep breath. I knew where his eyes were. I had looked already, and the heart was ice in my breast.
The palace had taken the full brunt of Hawge’s wrath. Most of it was roofless, much of it had burnt. Every tower was a truncated heap. A plume of smoke trailed from the Treasury. I knew how the gardens would look. Crazy fragments of wood, fabric, stone, had been strewn broadcast under the impact of the blows. Hawge must have used its tail, over and over, with the most deliberate malice, a child smashing another’s dearest toy. What crowned Saphar was not a builder’s gay extravaganza, but a trashy wreck.
I think we walked up through the town. I know we walked under Berrian’s arch, for it was intact. Tugging and kicking and clambering over the rubble in the gatehouse, I could feel that eye, a mute, burning indictment on my back.
Beryx went straight to the queen’s rooms. They were silent, a hideous tangle of crumpled wood. He searched quickly, efficiently, you would think rationally, unless you saw his eyes. I trailed like a shadow, with as much mind of my own.
He did not bother with his own rooms, any more than he had with Inyx’s tower. After one cursory glance at the Treasury, he turned to the Asterne steps.
There are a hundred and fifty, ascending the pinnacle that makes a stempost at the plateau’s eastern end. Some royal builder had planed and smoothed it into a tower, with guard rooms delved just below the circular summit where the mirror signalers watch. Some king, perhaps the tower-maker, crowned it with a little rotunda, six marble columns under a circle of peaked roof to shelter Asterne’s silver wind-bells, designed to make music from the play of Air.
The rotunda had been smashed to smithereens. The mirror-signal unit was in ruins. A couple of morvallin fled yarking as our heads appeared: I know now why soldiers loathe them with such deadly hate. As I eyed a long smear of blood over the southern parapet I heard Beryx grunt.
Inyx lay under the western wall. He must have been struck by the tail, then clawed. What was left lay on its face, a bloody sword by the limp right hand, the wide desert-fighter’s shoulders still clad in a rag of mail. This time he would not trouble me with ghosts.
I grew aware that Beryx was speaking, in a remote, numbed voice.
“He was waiting for the message. From Aslash. He would have been sure I’d come—”
His voice broke. He looked down. Then he went on, in the same tone, but now on a note of valediction.
“At least he used the sword.”
We walked back to the stairs. The guard-room door was ajar. In passing he gave it a shove, glanced in, and spun in his stride.
Sellithar was under the table, against the rear wall: huddled like an embryo. The folds of blue silk had caught his eye. She yielded to our touch, as a wooden doll’s limbs assume a position, and hold.
Beryx looked at her with those black eyes empty of all but perception. But then he touched her cheek and said gently, “Sellithar.”
She blinked. Slowly, her eyes came into focus. She saw me. The woodenness broke and with a great sob she hurled herself into my arms.
She cried dry-eyed, enormous racking sobs. I do not know what I did. I loved her, had thought her dead, and against all reason had her restored. What Beryx saw, or felt at her choice of comforter, hardly mattered at all.
Presently, between the sobs, came words.
“We saw it coming... He brought me up here. On the steps. He said, ‘When it sees us, we’ll run. You run in there.’”
I could look at Beryx then. He was listening with that same intent detachment. Sounding quite calm, he said, “He knew it would follow him. He must have meant to get in one good cut... I wonder why he missed?”
“He didn’t.” I recalled that red-crusted slash under the insect eye. When I told him, he nodded slowly, equably. “Good.” Then the pupils contracted and his eyes filled with a laughter green and cold and cruel as Hawge’s own. “I’m glad,” he said, “he managed that.”
He turned away. “Bring her down, Harran. We’ve a lot to do.”
“Search for the maerian?” The mere thought appalled me.
“I never meant to search for it,” he answered calmly. “I wanted five days for evacuation. Four should be enough.”
Just before he left the door I regained my wits. “Wh-where are we going?” I managed. And he glanced back in surprise.
“Maer Selloth,” he said. “There’s nowhere else.”
Saphar was less prostrate than it seemed. Kyvan emerged from the palace rubble with prayers on his lips and a fresh crimson cloak over his arm, there were five or six rational counselors. Inyx had sent the entire mirror-signal watch down from Asterne, and using his souvenir unit they restored the city’s tongue that day. Best of all, Morran met us at the gate-arch, announcing composedly, “Five hundred of the Guard fit and reported for duty, sir. We’ve been fighting fires.”
A lord’s wife with a whole house took charge of Sellithar. “I know what she needs, poor lamb.” Beryx set up his quarters on the market’s intact side, and with a harper for aide plunged into the task of uprooting a court, relocating a government, and moving lock, stock, and barrel out of a ruined city with zombies for half its inhabitants.
The details were endless: the Holym cattle, the Quarred gold, the remnant of the oil, the coming vintage, refugees, the dragon, the treasury, the court, the Army, communications, word to Maer Selloth... He cut through it like a knife, cold and tireless. On the fourth morning we rode out behind Sellithar’s horse litter, leaving a post of signalers and a gallant handful of council, lords, guildsmen, and soldiers behind. Ahead of us the rest of Saphar streamed on foot, horse, and carriage down the southern road.
* * * * *
Tirs had taken few Stiriand refugees and less damage from Hawge. Its long foothills are poor toward Bryve Elond, but eastward are fertile grain valleys, and Everran’s orchards. Countless songs praise the Tirien apple-buds that blow in white and blush-pink clouds against the red Helkent rock and the blue spring sky. It was less pretty in autumn, with the poor land dull yellow and fawn and the rocks showing through while the storms swept north to soak us in steady succession, but the Azilien valley is charming, a tiny clear river that chuckles below green norgal and finlythe and the odd rivannon, while iron crags of rust and vermilion thrust steadily higher above.
Maer Selloth is a stronghold, set atop a mountain knee above Azilien’s source, a red wall girdled about the hill summit with the keep lowering atop. At its back is Everran’s only border post: Bryve Tirien, giving on the gorge where the Mellennor heads. Both Quarred and Estar have an interest in that pass, and have not been above using it. It was in my mind that Beryx might mean to use it too.
I knew he would feel Saphar’s ruin as a failed trust, as piercing to the king as the manner of Inyx’s death had been to the comrade and friend. He never spoke of that. Only, as we rode up to Maer Selloth, I saw him lift his eyes to the citadel, intact, undefeated, with a yearning that held pain and shame and grief. Then he said quietly, “Harran, when you have time... Inyx. Could you make—a song?”
I was grateful that there were several songs to make in Maer Selloth. The town is small and primitive, grossly overcrowded, there was friction with the people who feared, if they did not say it, that we would bring the dragon on them. Another hearthbard served there, and no Resh lord is happy when his king descends on him, even if that king is his son-in-law. Especially a lord like Tenevel, when he is less subject than ally, and the king is in exile, or what might be seen as outright flight.
Tenevel was courteous enough. He took in Saphar’s folk readily if not warmly, he met Beryx on his threshold with a grave, reserved smile: a dark man—Sellithar favors her mother—with a Tiriann’s whippy build and ruler’s decision in an alert hunter’s eye. But ruling had taught him ruthlessness as well.
Hawge returned to complete Saphar’s ruin, expelling the garrison to Asleax on the Maer Selloth road, leveling the very walls, before it went to gorge on Holym cattle and gloat over Ragnor’s gold. Nobody thought that would last. I consoled myself with Sellithar’s regained color, thawed numbness, and a gaiety I rarely saw in Saphar, and if I was not making songs, escaped to the streets.
I had sought more than weapons in the Confederacy. Whenever I met the rare bard with more lore than I, I would toss Stavan’s question into the talk. “What do you know of aedryx?” I would ask.
Estarians had never heard of them. A Holymlase bard said they were wizards, but all long dead. A Quarred steading harper told me flatly that “aedryx is an old word for towers—towers of guard—” and cited eight: Stiriand, Histhira, Tirien, Hazghend, Tyrwash, Berfylghja, Havos, and Heagian.
An Everran fort, a range, a direction, a country, and four phantoms were only riddles, cryptic, maddening. Another Quarred bard claimed Havos had been in Bryve Elond. “Its ruins are that hump just at the saddle-top.” The others he did not know. Ragnor’s hearthbard said aedryx were “connected with Lossian,” but having only two couplets of the song, he had discarded it. He did know they were wizards, and he added an odd phrase. “Wizards,” he said, “of the mind.”
I had greater hopes of Tirs, if only from Sellithar’s talisman. Many new riddles were itching in my own mind. Beyond Stavan’s connection of aedryx and Lossian and “green eyes” and Beryx’s own reaction to Thassal’s gift, there was the way he had looked in the dragon’s eyes unharmed. The way they seemed to read each other’s thoughts. Moreover, if I understood aright, he had not only met Hawge’s eyes but told it an outright lie. And been believed. Recalling how Hawge had seen through me on the battlefield, I grew itchier still.
Tenevel’s bard laughed at the talisman, “an old upland tale.” He had heard of aedryx, but never bothered with the lore. “Dead wizards, surely, are hardly memorable?” He preferred sugary compliments on my battle-song and eager interest in what I was making next. I returned an Estarian no-reply, and went back to the streets.
Then, walking up a squalid hillside alley jammed with rickety shops and refugees, I heard a song.
When the bitter water
Catches ahltar’s daughter
Who will save her eyes?
The voice was thin, unaccompanied, but true. The tune was strange to me. It had a fey, elusive quality alien to the songs of men.
When the Flametree’s tower
Falls to apple-flower
Who can swear it lies?
I tracked it through the trash and piled goods and people’s beds and howling urchins to an even smaller alley that was torch-lit before mid-afternoon.
When fengsoth and fenghend
Run with Ilien’s finghend
Women will be wise—
In the gutter a man was sitting, face uplifted to the patchy yellow flare as he sang. The white eyes in the gaunt, nobly-boned old head told me he was blind, as so many great harpers are. He was also hairless, thin as a wraith, wrapped in the rags of what had been a hearthbard’s robe. He sat in the gutter with an empty, dirty cap beside him and sang without so much as hope of an audience, because singing was all he had.
As wise as havos’ brother
Who has the Air for mother—
Sees the light and dies.
Feeling as if I had seen my own death, I waited till the end. Then I sat on my heels and asked, “Father, where did you learn that?”
He turned his vacant stare. I said, “I am Everran’s hearthbard. And I never heard it before.”
His features showed a flash of eroded contempt, but he lacked the spirit even to scorn ignorant youth. He said in that husk of a superb voice, “I had it from my father. It is very old.”
“Who made it?” I asked. “And for whom?”
He was seeking some context to make it intelligible. My heart bled for a lifetime spent besieging apathy and ignorance. But he was a harper: if we have lore, we will try to pass it on.
“It was made by Delostar,” he said. “A wizard. He made it for his sister. She was kin to Lossian.”
He was too old to move to the keep: the honor he deserved would only have wearied or filled him with emptiness. I took him into his great-niece’s shop behind us, got him a place by the kitchen fire, a bowl of bacon and beans—they were ready enough to serve the royal bard. When he had eaten, and might believe I was in earnest, I said, “What do you know about aedryx?” Already knowing that this time there would be a reply.
* * * * *
When I left it was far on in the autumn evening, and it astonished me to find Maer Selloth festooned in leaping yellow fire. Then I remembered it was Iahn’s day, which Tirianns celebrate at home. Doubtless a risky proceeding, among the wooden houses of Maer Selloth, but one which has bestowed its name: with its constellation of yellow cockades perched there in the black of the hidden mountains, it did indeed resemble the Shadow of the Stars.
Bracing myself, I climbed toward the keep, trying to hurry lest Beryx should want to honor the day, with my new lore leaden on my feet. But just beyond the gatehouse I was startled to meet Morran, and Morran in a hurry. Startled, because he had the knack of making speed without haste, and more startled because he snatched my arm and whisked me straight out onto the battlements.
“Have you seen the king?” He was breathing hard. “I thought not. I looked for you everywhere, I was coming to find you—” A spurting bonfire caught his face: the cheekbones were bosses, the jaw clenched in a rigor of rage. “You don’t know what’s happened? Hawge has moved, crossed the road south of Veth Tirien, hit the Tirilien Vale. No, listen. It’s worse than that. Tenevel came to the king. You know how they—Yes. And it’s been getting worse. Beryx said, ‘Evacuate.’ Tenevel looked at him. Then he said, ‘To Estar?’ No, I didn’t hit him. I’m a guard. The king—”
He swallowed. “Tenevel stuck his chin out and looked hard as rocks. Then he said, ‘Everran has fed the dragon. I will not gorge it in Tirs.’ Beryx said, ‘How will you stop it?’ Tenevel stuck. Then he said, ‘If there is no other way, I will remove the curse.’
“No, don’t. Stand still. There’s more. Beryx said nothing. That made Tenevel push it. He said, ‘I have never shamed my hearth. But now I must think of my Resh.’ No! Be quiet. Beryx was... how he’s been. That woke him up. ‘Explain yourself,’ he said. ‘Tirs must have addled my wits.’ That stirred Tenevel up too. ‘Very well,’ he said. “Go out of my city, before you are its bane.’ Beryx said, ‘This is still Everran.’ Tenevel said, ‘Not any more. I am going to secede—’ No, wait! Beryx said, ‘You will find Hawge harder to dethrone.’ Tenevel said, ‘I think not. I know the lore. King-summoned, if not king-slain. Leave Tirs, and it will follow you.’”
Morran took a deep breath. I could see his jaw muscles trembling.
“He—Beryx—the king said, ‘Will you cast out Everran, or only me?’ Tenevel said, ‘Go or stay, the people may choose. But whoever leaves, there is one you will not take. You left my daughter to go junketing abroad: it did not save Saphar and you nearly murdered her. You have made her unhappy, in that northern tomb. And in five years you have not given her a child.’”
The fires roared below us, glinting on his tears, the rage and grief of a man whose loyalty, his life’s deepest piety, has been outraged. I was beyond tears. As I made for the gate he hurried behind me, talking faster still. “I said, ‘Let me take the Guard and see to this.’ He said, ‘Shall I murder a host and vassal? Get out!’ I don’t know what to do. Harper—”
“Do nothing,” I said. “He would not want it. To him, Tenevel has the right. He could not save his own kingdom. He cannot kill someone trying to defend theirs.”
Morran said furiously, “Tenevel has no right—”
I said, “You are a soldier, take orders. You can do no more.”
Sellithar had her maiden rooms. Beryx, refusing to evict Tenevel’s family, had lodged in the turret above. Hurrying upstairs, I sought something to play. Music speaks, if not so plainly as words. Sympathy he would deny, counsel he would not tolerate, pity he would spurn like burning brands. He had maimed himself, humbled himself to the Confederacy, lost his friend and his capital. Now his kingdom was crumbling and his queen would go as well.
I dared not think of Sellithar. If ever I had hoped to win her, it was not like this. But then I remembered Tenevel, turning his king out like a mendicant weaver, casting Sellithar’s barrenness in his face, talking of “my” Resh to the man who gave it him, and I did not tiptoe in as I had intended, I almost kicked down the door.
Beryx had drawn a chair to the window-slit. He was leaning forward, chin on palm, elbow on the sill. The fires lit his profile: incisive, unyielding, unreadable. But his pride would see to that. I jerked up a stool and began to play.
If music can speak scorn, that should have scalded Tenevel’s ears. When I finished, the last thing I expected was for Beryx to remark in quiet amusement, “Harran, I can still fight my own wars.”
Not wishing to be as pitiless as Tenevel, as Morran, I did not respond, How?
“I’ve been thinking,” he mused, “about that... What do you know of aedryx, Harran?”
My breath stopped. I think my neck bristled. After the afternoon it was too pat, too apposite, too like Hawge—with a sinking in my stomach, I answered, “Nothing good.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“They were wizards,” I began. “A long time ago: even before Berrian. They ruled this country—all of it, the whole Confederacy. They had magic powers.” Wizards of the mind. “Not like the children’s tales, staffs and spells and potions. They could... see through walls. Talk to each other fifty miles apart.” Read men’s thoughts. “Something like... mesmerize anyone who looked at them.” Like Hawge. “They could blind, stun, kill—with nothing but their eyes. And... the worst was, they were evil. Cruel. Selfish. They tore the country apart. In the end, they destroyed each other. For a whim. For,” I could hear Asc’s deep voice saying it, “sheer wantonness.”
He was still looking beyond Maer Selloth’s luminance, into the empty north. He sounded curiously distant.
“Were they born—or made?”
“Eh?” I said.
“Were they born with magic—or was it taught to them?”
“I don’t know.” I felt stupid. “Asvith only told me what they did.”
Slowly, Beryx straightened up.
“We have tried soldiers,” he said. His voice was very soft, quite impersonal. With shock I saw my restoration had been superfluous: under that shell was not surrender but a fire that burnt steadily, unquenched. “We have tried champions. Bribes. Treaties. We can’t find a hero. But we might find a wizard—if we tried.”
Suddenly I was filled with unreasoning, instinctive fear. “Lord,” I said. “Lord... the old harper who told me, said, ‘I am singing songs of the aedryx to remind me that there are—worse things than Hawge.’”
His voice was very low. “There is nothing else.”
“Surely there must be something?” The fear was still on me, the inexplicable, irrational warning that the remedy would be worse than the bane. “Or someone? Must you...”
“I must,” he said it softly, cold as steel. “I will.”
Something else was in the room with us: an awareness, a willful, incalculable power, answerable to nothing, wayward, mocking, capable of destroying the world for a jest. I had a terrifying sense that with those few words the king I knew had already transformed himself.
“Lord,” I said desperately, “they’re dead!”
He looked round at me. The fires’ glow masked the scar. All I saw was the puck of a mouth-corner and the glint of a half-veiled eye.
“I think,” he said, almost casually, “that I have aedric blood.”
“Berrian,” he went on in that light, unstressed voice. “A long time ago. But I heard my nurse once, talking. She said, ‘Oh, he’s Berrheage sure enough. He’s got the aedric eyes.’ My father wouldn’t explain. The one time I saw him afraid. But you say aedryx magic was in their eyes. And I could look at the dragon. You shouldn’t be able to. But did you ever think about Berrian’s crest? An eye. Berrian. Lossian. Lossian had... green eyes.”
I must have choked. He nodded. “You’ve heard that one?”
“It’s impossible!” I burst out. “The aedryx are gone! You don’t have the magic! All you have is the blood!”
He smiled at me: a fey, gentle, blood-chilling smile. “A weapon,” he repeated, softly, “that has not been forged.”
I dropped my harp. His arm, his pride, his friend, his capital, I had seen what prices he would pay to save Everran. Never, in my wildest nightmares, had I imagined such a price as this.
He was still smiling, with that perverse gaiety that chilled my spine. “So if we don’t have a wizard,” he murmured, “and a wizard is the weapon—one will have to be made.”
My voice came out a croak. “It... you... How?”
He stood up, lightly, but with a smooth, leisured movement quite unlike his usual swift decisiveness. “I think,” he said, “that since I am no longer welcome in Tirs... I shall go to Coed Wrock.”
The Four know what drove me to it: shame, loyalty, insanity, the thing in harpers’ blood that cannot be gainsaid. “Then I am coming with you,” I announced.
He laughed. “Yes,” he said, still chuckling, “if ever there was a time to ‘appraise the men of valor,’ it will be now.”