The Silver Mage

by Katharine Kerr

  “They’re a brother and sister,” Galla said, “who used to live in a village farther west. Poor little Penna and the other village women were abducted by the wretched Horsekin, but, may the Goddess be thanked, our men rescued them last summer.”

  “Now, Taurro was a rider in Gwerbret Ridvar’s warband.” Solla picked up the story. “He lost his arm in the fighting, and now he’s a dependent of my husband’s. He’ll be our gatekeeper once we’ve built our own dun.”

  “I did wonder if they were bloodkin,” Wynni said. “They do much resemble each other.”

  “Indeed they do,” Galla said. “Now, I’ve been told that the children weren’t born in that village. Their mother was widowed—I’m afraid I forget how—and ended up there when she married again.”

  “Her first husband was a river fisherman who drowned,” Solla put in. “Penna mentioned that to me.”

  Drowned? Wynni thought. Caught in a weir, mayhap, or a net, when he swam as an otter? The mystery began to intrigue her.

  In the morning, Penna came into her chamber to bring her wash water and to set the chamber pot outside the door for a servant of lower rank to empty. While Berwynna washed, Penna bustled around the chamber, pulling back the heavy drape at the window, smoothing out the blankets on the bed.

  “My lady Galla does say that she’ll find you a coverlet by nightfall,” Penna remarked. “She be ever so generous.”

  “Most certainly she be that,” Wynni said. “Lady Solla, she be a kindly soul, too.”

  “Oh, very! I know how lucky I be, to have fetched up here.”

  “You come from the Northlands, bain’t?”

  Penna turned half away and froze, staring at the curved stone wall of the chamber.

  “Oh, here,” Wynni said. “My apologies. Never did I mean to frighten you.”

  Penna turned around, and her pinched little face had gone pale. “How be it that you know that?” she said.

  “I do come from the Northlands myself, though not from your people.”

  “My people?” Penna’s eyes grew wide. “What do you know of my people? I know naught, you see. We did leave when I were so small, and my mam, she would tell me naught, no matter how much I begged to know.”

  “Well, they do live in villages by the river and grow crops there. I think me they also be great fisherfolk.”

  “Why?”

  Wynni picked her words carefully before she spoke. “Well, I think me they do swim in the river and catch their fish on the fin, as it were. Like you the water?”

  “I do not!” Penna stamped one foot. “My mam, she did always tell me, shun you the water. ’Twill carry you away, she did say.”

  “Did she warn your brother, too?”

  “She didn’t.” Penna frowned, considering. “She did let Taurro swim in the river with the other lads. I did ask her once why he might swim but not me, and she just said that I be different. When I did ask her how, she looked ever so frightened. I mustn’t ever ask her that again, she did say, and she did give me a good slap to help me remember her saying. So I didn’t.”

  Berwynna hesitated, wondering if she should tell Penna the truth. The lass cocked her head to one side.

  “You know why, don’t you?” Penna said. “Do tell me, please.”

  “Be you sure you want the knowing? Naught will be the same for you if I do tell you.”

  Penna hesitated. As Berwynna waited, she wished that she could run to Angmar or Dallandra for advice.

  “I do,” Penna said at last. “Please, do tell me what you know.”

  “Far to the north of here there be a people who do look much like you and your brother. They do have your hair, your brows, and the like. I think me you were born among them, and your mam, she did flee them for some reason with the pair of you. They be otter folk, truly, shapechangers. Know you what a shapechanger be?”

  “I did hear old tales and suchlike.” Penna’s voice barely rose above a whisper. “Be they true?”

  “They be so. I think me that if you were to swim in running water, a change would come over you. Why else would your mam worry so?”

  Penna’s face blanched. Without another word she turned and ran from the chamber. Wynni followed more slowly, cursing her own bluntness. She could only hope she’d not terrified the poor lass into avoiding her ever after. That very afternoon, however, Penna sought her out.

  “I be done with my work for the nonce,” Penna said. “Please, Lady Berwynna, would it please you to come with me to the meadow? There be a stream there. There be a need on me to know if you did speak true about my kin.”

  “Well and good, then,” Berwynna said. “It be a nice warm day.”

  No one noticed them when they left the dun and hurried down the hill to the meadow. Near the stream a wide circle had been beaten down in the grass, the place where the silver wyrm had laired during his brief stay. At the stream bank, Penna stripped off her overdress readily enough, then paused, her eyes wide with terror.

  “Only do this if you be sure you do want to,” Wynni said. “Truly, I never meant to trouble your heart so deeply.”

  “It be not you,” Penna said. “I be grateful that you did tell me what you know.” She took a deep breath, then bent down to grab the hem of her underdress and pulled it up.

  Wynni helped her get the dress over her head. Wearing only a loin wrap around her skinny hips, Penna took a step off the bank and into the stream. She gasped aloud, then flung herself into the water with a cry of near-sexual delight. She rolled over and over, and as she moved, a glittering blue light sprang from her body and wrapped her round, so bright that Wynni could barely look upon it.

  The light receded, then vanished. A skinny half-grown otter, just Penna’s size, wallowed in the water with little yips of joy. Wynni could just barely understand her words. “Good, good.”

  The stream ran too shallow for diving or even proper swimming. After a few more splashes and rolls, the Dwrgi lass clambered out of the water and began to shake the drops from her fur. As she shook, she danced in a circle. In a flash of blue light, the otter disappeared.

  Penna stood shivering on the bank with water dripping from her human hair and dripping down her human back. When Wynni handed over her underdress, the lass slipped it on, patting the cloth as if to thank it. She looked up and gave Wynni a weak smile.

  “You were right,” Penna said. “I be half an otter, and we must come from the Dwrgi folk, Taurro and me.”

  “Indeed you must. Did that hurt, changing so?”

  “It did not. It were the sweetest feeling I ever did have, a melting, like, into the water. My thanks, Lady Berwynna, my humble thanks! May the Goddess bless you forever for the helping of me.”

  “You be most welcome, truly. Mayhap someday you’ll be going north to meet your kin, someday when the Horsekin be not prowling around.”

  “Mayhap. Yet I do think my mam, she were forced to flee them. Why else did we fetch up so far from—from home?” Penna’s voice broke, and she wept, covering her face with her hands.

  Berwynna threw her arms around her and held her while she sobbed. It be a hard thing, she thought, to learn such dweomer truths about yourself. For the first time in her entire life, she considered the possibility that Mara, her ever so annoying sister, might have been equally distressed to learn that she was no ordinary lass, but one with an enormous wyrd laid upon her, a burden to be carried as much as an honor to be cherished. There be a need on me to ask her about that, she thought, if ever I do see her again.

  Penna’s tears ended at last. She pulled away and wiped her face on her overdress before putting it on. Berwynna pulled a handful of grass and gave it to her to use to blow her nose.

  “My thanks,” Penna stammered. “For the truth, too. I just be so—well, so surprised, I think I do mean.”

  “No doubt!”

  Penna smiled, blew her nose, and let the ill-used grass fall to the ground. She turned and looked northward.

  “We’d best get ourselves back to t
he dun,” Berwynna said. “I would you not take a chill or suchlike.”

  “Well and good, then.”

  Yet as they walked back, Berwynna noticed how often Penna looked to the north, as if she might see her peculiar kinfolk, so far away, by force of will.

  Kov, meanwhile, had seen all the Dwrgwn he ever wished to see, even though traveling with a group of dedicated spearmen proved far faster and easier than traveling with an entire village of their kind. As they marched through the narrow tunnels that led west, Kov found himself missing the treasure chamber and its gold so badly that he knew he’d escaped the glittering trap just in time. You’re like a sot, he told himself, moaning and shivering when there’s no drink to be had. Without the gold’s invisible mist to deaden his feelings, he lived with the infuriating awareness that he’d been enslaved.

  The presence of Gebval the spirit talker became a second irritation. Every now and then he caught this supposed dweomerman staring at him grimly. When Kov would catch his gaze, Gebval would ostentatiously test the sharpness of his bronze blade with a callused thumb. You fraud! Kov would think. I’ll wager your supposed dweomer is just as false as that silly binding spell. Yet he refrained from voicing the insult. Since the others believed that Gebval had magic, they doubtless would react badly to any slight to their shaman.

  On the journey west, Kov might have schemed out a way to escape had he not realized that he hated the Horsekin even more than he’d come to hate the Dwrgwn. He wanted little Clakutt avenged, for starters, and then vengeance for his ancestors, slain as they fled Lin Rej, for Lin Rej itself, for the Mountain Folk slain in the recent wars, the same for the dead Westfolk, and even for the Deverry losses, the soldiers killed as allies of his people. By the time he and his band of Dwrgwn reached the fortress, Kov had worked himself into a state of icy rage.

  Late on an afternoon, the tunnel they were currently following led them to a wide circular chamber, some twenty feet underground by Kov’s estimate. Scraps of rotting cloth, bits of rope and leather thongs, pieces of broken pottery, and fragments of wooden boards, black with age and mold, littered half the floor, though the other half looked reasonably clean.

  “This place be safe.” Leejak informed Kov. “We do rest here.”

  “Are we near the fortress, then?” Kov said.

  “Not far, but not right next, they tell me.” He gestured at the Dwrgwn from the northern village. “We reach edge of barrow land. South edge, that be.”

  This chamber, Kov realized, must have served the Dwrgi grave robbers as a way station, a place to rest and free their treasures from the original wrappings. He walked over to the littered scraps and idly poked through it with one booted foot. Black hairy spiders scuttled away, but he found nothing else of interest. On the far side of the chamber stood a wooden door, roughly made of axe-split planks. When Kov shoved it open, the smell of fresh air greeted him, and a shaft of sunlight that revealed another tunnel leading north.

  “That doesn’t look very promising,” Kov said to Leejak. “I want to climb up to that vent and look out.”

  “Good thought.”

  This vent, however, lacked a ladder, and Kov was far too short to reach it. Leejak turned and whistled, then held up two fingers. Jemjek and Grallag trotted over to join them. After a few words from the spearleader, they hoisted Kov up. He stood on Jemjek’s shoulders and stuck his head—very carefully—through the moldy wooden grating.

  Through a scant cover of long grass he could see westward to a stand of trees. Between the trees, water gleamed.

  “There’s a river ahead,” Kov told Leejak. “And I can just see some kind of boat—ye gods, it’s a barge!”

  As the barge glided downriver, it winked into and out of view through the trees. Kov caught glimpses of its cargo.

  “It’s carrying stone blocks,” he said. “We must be near the fortress, all right. But that river’s going to cause us a cursed lot of trouble.”

  Carefully he extricated his head from the grating, then let Grallag haul him down. Gebval was standing in the open doorway, glaring again, his hand on the hilt of the bronze knife. Kov restrained his urge to make a rude gesture.

  That night Leejak questioned the northern Dwrgwn, extracting every bit of knowledge they had about this stretch of country, then passing it on to Kov. As Kov had suspected, the tunnel system never crossed under the river. Even a skilled crew of Mountain men would have been hard pressed to make such a crossing waterproof and thus safe. Instead, the tunnel system turned north and ran parallel to the river until it reached the rich pickings of the barrow fields. While the Dwrgwn could have transformed and swum across, Kov could not. Even more to the point, in otter form they’d never have been able to carry their digging tools, earth-moving baskets, and other such supplies.

  “We go north little ways,” Leejak said. “Find ford, cross there.”

  The northern Dwrgwn immediately objected, not that they had any other plan in mind. They voiced idea after idea, all of them unworkable or even merely silly. After a long evening of squabbling, which on several occasions nearly led to blows, everyone finally agreed with Leejak’s original idea, thanks to Gebval, who finally made himself useful by delivering the opinion that Leejak was right.

  Kov found himself remembering the constant arguing among his own kinsfolk. Among the Mountain Folk, the arguments arose when individuals refused to change an idea or budge an inch from a position—the vices of Earth, he supposed. The Dwrgwn, on the other hand, suffered from the vices of Water, endlessly flowing, always changing, unless the rare individual like Leejak could finally contain their ideas in a vessel made of hard thought.

  In the morning they set off again, heading north through the tunnels. At each ventilation shaft either Leejak or Kov would climb up and look at the river, which stubbornly flowed deep and fast at the edge of the view. On the third day, however, they found a surprise: a bridge. Just at sunset Kov spotted it, a ramshackle affair of planks laid on pilings, thrown up hastily out of timber so green that the roadbed was already pulling apart. Judging from the stumps of trees he saw all along the bank, whoever had built the bridge had cut their raw materials on site. He climbed back down to report what he’d seen.

  “Think it hold us?” Leejak said.

  “If we’re careful,” Kov said. “The Horsekin must have built it to get horsemen across the river.”

  “Ah. Maybe the ones that burn huts.”

  “It could be, indeed. After we bring down the fortress, we can retreat back here, cross the bridge, and burn it behind us.”

  “Good plan. If we live so long.”

  “There is that.” Kov tried to smile and failed. “Well, all we can do is hope for the best. To that end, we need to send a scout up. See if Horsekin are guarding the thing.”

  Leejak snorted profoundly. “I go myself. These—” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the other Dwrgwn, “—be useless.”

  Kov agreed, but he said nothing aloud.

  When twilight grew thick outside, Leejak climbed up to the vent, pulled out the wooden grating, and hauled himself over the edge to the ground above. Kov stayed on the ladder and watched as the spearleader ran, half-crouching, to the riverbank. He made his way among a scatter of bushes, where he paused to take off his clothes. When Leejak slipped into the water, Kov saw a brief glimmer of blue light, then lost track of the spearleader completely in the dark ripples of water.

  Twilight turned to night. The stars came out and began their slow wheeling climb toward zenith. Kov’s legs began to ache on his awkward perch, but he kept watch. Without Leejak, he felt, the expedition would fail, which meant he himself would end up sacrificed to the Water gods by a gloating Gebval. My throat slit and my blood given to the river, he decided. Or bound to one of those stone pillars and knifed.

  Down below him, he could hear the Dwrgwn squabbling over who had received more of their diminishing rations of stale flatbread. He considered climbing out and disappearing into the night, but what would happen to him t
hen? As much as he hated to admit it, his safety lay with Leejak and his followers.

  After what seemed like half the night, though the wheel of the stars had only marked out an eighth of its journey, a damp Leejak returned. Kov climbed down to let the spearleader swing himself onto the ladder and follow.

  “No guards,” Leejak said. “I round up our men. We hurry across now. Who knows who comes later?”

  “Just so,” Kov said. “What do we do once we’ve crossed?”

  “Hide in trees to west. Then dig.”

  “Dig tunnels south, down to the fortress, you mean?”

  “That, too. Place to hide, place to think.” Leejak paused to look up at the opening of the shaft. “Too strange up there. Too wide, too many stars.”

  Getting all the Dwrgwn up and out, as well as hauling up all the gear, took far too much time and made too much noise for Kov’s peace of mind. He kept expecting that at any moment a Horsekin barge would drift downriver and see them, or a mounted patrol would come bursting out of the woods to run them down with sa bers flashing in the starlight. At last everyone had assembled in a reasonably straight line. With Kov leading, and Leejak at the rear to ensure that no one stopped or strayed from the line of march, they headed for the bridge.

  When they reached it, even in the uncertain light, Kov could see that it had been built on the ruins of an older structure. Stone pilings, cracked and mossy, rose a few feet out of the water. New wooden pilings had been driven next to these ancient supports only in the center of the structure, where the bridge arched high enough for a barge to slip through. Near each shore the Horsekin had laid their rough-cut planks over the old stones.

  “We go few at time,” Leejak said.

  “Good idea,” Kov said. “The gods only know how they got horses across this thing!”

  “Slowly,” Leejak said then laughed.

  Despite Kov’s fears, the entire expedition got across safely, though certainly not silently. The wood creaked and groaned under any greater weight than a single Dwrgi. The men kept slipping and cursing, snapping at those closest to them as if the slip were someone else’s fault. Kov could only pray that the sound of water rushing along under the bridge would cover the noise, assuming that any Horsekin laired near enough to hear it.By the first gray light of dawn, they all reached the stand of virgin forest that Leejak had spotted off to the west. In among the underbrush they could hide their supplies and themselves. The Dwrgwn spread out, nestling down to sleep in the bracken among the trees.