Once A Hero

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Gena spotted Count Berengar amidst the dancers with a tall woman who moved gracefully and sensuously in perfect time with the music. As Berengar spun her, the woman laughed and raised her free hand to her throat. The gown she wore closely resembled Gena's in design—though it did show off more bosom—and the skirts lapped like waves around Berengar's legs as they danced.

  The dance ended by the time Rik and Gena reached the bottom of the stairs. Berengar bowed to his partner, then headed straight toward the two of them. That brought a flash of anger to the dark-haired woman's blue eyes. Gena immediately decided the woman had to be Lady Martina, so she gave her a politely patronizing smile intended to convince Martina that trailing after Berengar for an introduction would not be a good idea.

  Berengar bowed deeply to the both of them. "Welcome, my friends, to this modest celebration. In an hour or so we will raise a toast in your honor—thoroughly embarrassing you, I am certain." A bright smile lit his face, and Gena saw a bead of sweat roll down his cheek from his temple. "Until then we have food and wine and the best music to be had in this region of Centisia. Please, enjoy yourselves."

  Gena knew that even without resorting to magick, she could have predicted how the rest of the evening would proceed. When the music began playing again, Berengar waited for Rik to take Gena out onto the dance floor, but when he did not, the count asked Rik's permission to dance with Gena. Rik consented graciously, Berengar asked, she accepted, and the two of them moved into the crowd and into the music as if they had been partnered together for years.

  In retrospect Gena realized that during the dance she came as close to slipping into the party as she would all night. Berengar's strong right hand at the small of her back provided just the right clues to tell her when and how and where they would move together. They wove through the throng, whirling in time to the music, barely avoiding collisions and tempting fate by darting back against the flow. They cut past the other couples like a ship's prow through light waves, laughing and smiling at the surprised and distressed expressions on those who parted before them.

  Coming all the way around the dance floor, not unexpectedly did Gena see Lady Martina speaking closely with Rik. Gena laughed immediately at the idea that a woman barely a tenth of her age would attempt to show her up by flattering Rik. Elves were by no means above the common tricks used to embarrass and chasten rivals, but their longevity meant that their methods were often more subtle and would take decades to accomplish what Men might attempt in one turn on the dance floor. Gena's Elven perspective made Martina's flirtation with Rik transparent and, thereby, pathetic.

  As Berengar spun her past the other two, Gena caught the quick flash of Rik's eyes. He, too, she saw, recognized Martina's game and indulged Martina for his own ends. Gena felt a moment of compassion for the woman because she knew Rik's contempt for pretense. Rik would play with Martina as a cat might play with a mouse. He would draw her out with smiles, nods and kind comments; encouraging her to reveal more of herself. Before she knew it, he would have gotten her to betray a secret held in the strictest confidence. In that moment she would find herself embarrassed at having spoken out of turn, and mortified over being outwitted by the man she had sought to use for her own purposes.

  Her analysis of the games being played between Martina and Rik closed the window into the festivities that the dance had opened for her. For the rest of the evening she remained polite, but superficial. She marked people by their reaction to her. Those who were afraid because of Eldsaga tales she rewarded with a cold imperiousness that fulfilled their expectations. When someone showed signs of infatuation with her because of her race, she alluded to experiences that no Man could understand, heightening her alien standing.

  She dealt most cruelly with those who deluded themselves enough to believe they were fluent in the Sylvan tongue. She made her replies to them in an older form of the language, then enlisted Rik as an interpreter. Though he knew much less Sylvan than the people speaking with her, Rik's glib tongue and quick wit often served to make plays on words. Many presumptuous people wandered away utterly confused, which brought Gena a perverse sense of satisfaction, yet one about which she felt embarrassed.

  Soon enough Berengar offered the toast to the two of them, and the assembly drank to their health. After that she danced again with Berengar, then she and Rik excused themselves and returned to their chambers. By agreement they met in her room for a final glass of wine, then had a celebration of their own. And unlike the ball they had left, in this celebration she felt no detachment at all, except for maybe once, just once, when Rik's hand rested against her back where Berengar had held her, and she wondered what it would have been like to have the count in Rik's place.

  Gena awoke alone the next morning, but this neither surprised nor distressed her. The one true vice she had was a desire to sleep late. After a century and a half of rising with the sun as she studied the Arcs from her grandaunt Larissa, she willfully indulged herself in waking up slowly. For her a perfect day began with quiet and reflection. She thought about the dream fragments she could remember, then planned out her day. In Cygestolia she often chose to sun herself in the upper reaches of her family's home, but she had not done that very often since her grandaunt went excedere.

  In the Fisher mansion, which could not hope to rival Woodspire in antiquity or beauty, she contented herself basking in a sunbeam.

  Rik, she had learned quickly, awoke with feline alertness and a boundless energy. He required noise in the morning. When they stayed in inns, he would be down in the common room at the crack of dawn, listening to gossip, trading stories, and offering opinions on whatever the latest news had been. When they were alone on the road, he would sing songs or whistle. Whereas she luxuriated in quiet to start the day, he reveled in chaos—seeking it out or creating it as circumstances required.

  Rik had roused himself very early. Kissing her on the mouth, he smiled and whispered, "Last night we saw the birds that dwell in the top of the tree. Today I want to learn about the moles and voles."

  Two hours later Gena finally swam clear of the sheets and thick comforter on the bed and pulled on the clothes she had worn on the road in coming to Aurdon. The faint trace of dampness in the blouse's cuffs told her the clothes had been laundered and, from the scent of them, dried in the kitchen. Her stomach rumbled once, tentatively, then quieted as she pulled a chair over and sat down in the rectangle of sunlight coming through one of the windows.

  A gentle knocking on the door brought her head up. She could see by the shift in the sunbeam that she had drifted off to sleep again, but she reawakened more clearly and sharply than earlier. Brushing her golden tresses back from her face with her right hand, she stood and turned toward the door. "Enter."

  Count Berengar bowed his head as he opened the door. He glanced up at her, smiled, then briefly looked around the room. "You are awake, good. Where is Durriken?"

  Gena shrugged. "Out. He prefers cities and has gone exploring."

  The count frowned for a moment. "When do you expect him to return?"

  "I do not know. He did not say."

  "I see."

  "Is this a problem?"

  "I suppose not, no." Berengar toyed with his beard. "Could you leave him a note telling him that you have gone riding with me?"

  "I can do that, yes." Gena heard a restrained energy in Berengar's voice, and his movements betrayed an urgency that he was trying to keep hidden. "Our sojourn, it cannot wait his return?"

  "Circumstances being what they are, no. It is but a day trip. I had hoped to leave immediately."

  "I will write the note," Retreating to the bed, she opened the drawer in the night table and removed a sheet of paper, a quill, and a small capped bottle of ink. She wrote out a suitable message, then folded it and wrote Rik's name on the outside. Leaving it on the table, she followed Berengar out of the room and to the stables. There she found Spirit already saddled and standing beside a huge black stallion.

  They mounted
up and rode out through the gates. Berengar chatted politely, pointing out items of interest. What Gena noticed most about his conduct and tour was that everything he said and did dwelt on a superficial level—a level that they had always moved beyond when speaking with each other. She suspected Berengar would share the reason for his caution, and she found herself hoping his situation had not made him an irredeemable paranoid.

  Once outside Aurdon, they headed east and picked up an escort of six riders. Two rode before them, two behind, and one wide on each wing. They were not clad as guards and appeared to be people just out on the road, with the pair bringing up the rear leading a heavily laden packhorse. Gena discerned their connection with Berengar because of their abnormal alertness and the fact that they varied their speed so that the count never left their sight.

  Gena smiled as she turned to him. "I think this would be an excellent time to inform me about what is going on. We are not out for a simple ride, despite neither of us being armed, are we?"

  The red-maned giant shook his head. "You are most perceptive, Lady Genevera. Captain Floris sent riders ahead of his column to report suspected Haladin riders in the area. We have pinpointed a number of Haladin camping grounds. I have a company going out to inspect the nearest of these, and I thought you would find it interesting to come along."

  "And you wanted to verify what you told us about the Riverens and the Haladina."

  Berengar nodded easily, acquiescing to Genevera's deduction. "I asked you here to undo what Neal did long ago. This will not be an easy task, and while it would please me for you to agree based on my reportage of facts, I think presenting you some evidence that I am telling the truth is important."

  "What we saw with the caravan was quite convincing." Gena smiled up at Berengar. "The Haladina clearly are ranging far from their Outlands."

  "True, but that is as much a symptom of the chaos born out of the empire's collapse into the commonwealth."

  Gena realized that Berengar had thought deeply about the political situation in the remains of the Red Tiger's empire. In Cygestolia the news of the empire's division by the provinces into a commonwealth had not excited much attention. That had been predicted since the forming of the empire in her grandfather's time. The fact that the empire had survived nearly four hundred years was seen as a mark of maturation by Men, though the bloody fighting that resulted as Men fought for control of their own small domains eroded some of the gains the humans had made in Sylvan minds.

  Berengar pointed at a large building set on the far shore of a small lake. "That is Lake Orvir. You can tell Durriken you have seen his holding."

  "It looks quite beautiful, and I imagine it can be quite pleasant when the city becomes too hot in the summer." Gena saw a small thread of smoke rising from behind the manor house. "Does someone live there? I see smoke."

  "Only a caretaker—an old servant who used to work for my brother in town. He was devoted to my late brother." Berengar shook his head. "I have suggested he be recalled to Aurdon because of Haladin raiding, but he refuses to come. He says he is too old for the Haladina to cause problems for him."

  "Though the caretaker may not have sense enough to realize it, Haladin raiding is a problem. I will help you curb it, whether or not the recovery of Neal's weapons is required."

  Berengar smiled broadly. "That is an offer I will gladly accept. I do have sorcerers among my Guard units, but they do not have the skill I understand you displayed in defeating the Haladina."

  Gena glanced down at Spirit and picked a bit of straw from the gelding's mane. "I suspect the telling about my efforts exceeds the actual event. I also have no doubt that your sorcerers are quite skilled and efficacious in their magicks. If I have an advantage over them, it is that I have spent far more time learning what I must know to work the Art."

  The tall man shrugged. "I will believe you because I understand nothing of magick." He sighed rather heavily. "Stratagems and tactics I understand perfectly, politics and mercantilism I have mastered, but magicks are color to a blind man."

  "Nonsense. You are intelligent. You may not have the talent for magick, but you certainly can understand its principles." Gena saw the disbelief on his face and took it as a challenge. "Have you a coin? Gold or copper, not silver."

  Berengar fished in the pouch on his belt and produced a shiny gold piece large enough that his thumb and forefinger barely encircled it. "Will this do?"

  "It will indeed." As he displayed it to her, she saw a man's profile on one side and a fisher taking wing on the other. "If you were to flip the coin into the air, as you might to make a choice or decide a contest, what are the chances of its coming up heads?"

  The warrior frowned for a moment, "One in two, if I am not mistaken."

  "Correct. So after flipping it ten times, what result would you expect?"

  "Five heads and five tails."

  "Good. Start flipping the coin."

  Berengar laughed lightly and did as she bid him. As the coin first arced up into the air, Gena muttered the words to a simple enchantment, one of the first taught to all students of the Art. The coin fell back to Berengar's hand, apparently unaffected or unaltered in any way. It landed with the face up.

  "One head."

  Gena just smiled as he proceeded to flip the coin nine more times. Berengar did not appear to become disturbed until the sixth toss came up heads. For the seventh and eighth he increased the rotational rate and for the final two he sent the coin higher in an effort to make it land with the bird staring up at him. His efforts came to naught, and his fingers closed quickly over the coin.

  "The Art allowed you to do that?"

  Gena nodded as she wiped a trickle of sweat from her cheek. "One aspect of magick is the manipulation of chance. With a coin, where the chances of either result are even, the trick is simple and the effort is not terribly taxing."

  Berengar frowned. "But you made a wagon explode. What do coins have to do with that?"

  "The wagon's explosion was just an expansion of the chance problem." She saw he had not made the connection. "What are the chances of a wagon catching fire?"

  "Relatively high, I imagine."

  "Correct. Getting it to ignite would have been very simple, but that wagon was already burning, so I had an advantage. The explosion came about because of the second factor in the Art. What I managed to do was compact the amount of time it would take for the wagon to burn completely. In effect, I made all of it combust at once, consuming it utterly. The heat and light it would have given off in the course of hours it gave off all at once, creating the explosion."

  Berengar's brow wrinkled as he pondered what she had told him. "If you can manipulate time . . ."

  "Saying it is much easier than doing it, I am afraid." Gena shook her head. "The difficulties of working magicks are legion. To work a spell I need to be able to concentrate on the casting. I need raw materials and I need to have enough personal strength to trigger the result I want. I could, I suppose, make horseshoes explode, but the amount of personal energy that would require would kill me."

  "Personal energy? Anger, happiness?"

  "No, physical strength and stamina." Gena felt a shiver run down her spine. "We do not allow emotions to become tied up in our magicks—speaking as an Elf now—except in very special ceremonies. Putting emotions into magick, using them to fuel magick, can lead to a loss of control that benefits no one. It could even kill the caster."

  Gena shifted her shoulders to ease the uncomfortable feeling. "There are other factors involved in magick, of course. The Laws of Similarity, Contagion, and Holomorphism bend the laws of probability. For example, two things that look alike, or are similar, have a natural bond between them. Likewise, things that have been together are bonded, and an item that is but a piece of another item has a natural link to it."

  "Hence the tales of witch women using a lock of hair or fingernail parings to fashion a love charm."

  The Elf nodded. "Yes, those are the stories, and those thin
gs have a slight link, but not an important one. Hair and fingernails have no blood and no nerves, so their links to the body are very weak. A finger or an ear or a tooth would have a stronger bond to the person from which it came.

  "That's a bit of a grisly example, but I understand it." Berengar smiled down at her. "Your skill at making the arcane transparent is impressive."

  "But only possible with a receptive and intelligent listener as the audience."

  Berengar laughed and spurred his horse forward as their ride took them out of the Aurdon valley. The outriders closed back up with the two of them, then they forded the Aurdon River and rode off toward the north and east. An hour later they stopped to water their horses in a tributary stream, then used that occasion to distribute the swords carried by the packhorse.

  Armed and armored, they set off again at a gentle trot. Spirit found the gait comfortable and matched the pace set by Berengar's stallion with little trouble. They made good time, and the route they took seemed surprisingly well traveled, a fact Gena mentioned to Berengar.

  "It is that. Logging teams created this road up into the mountains and down to the other side. Because the river curves far to the east, and farther yet east because of the way the floods three years ago moved its bed, using the mountain pass during the spring and summer makes the journey from Polston much quicker. The Haladin have been hitting caravans coming up through the mountains."

  Their ride continued and brought them up into the foothills of the Central Mountains. The road carved a muddy brown track on through a high meadow, but halfway through the valley, the riders struck off southeast and slipped through grasses and into the dark precincts of a forest. As she rode toward it and the woods swallowed the first two riders, Gena strained for any sounds of ambush, but heard nothing.