by Janny Wurts
"The beast has feathers over wings and tail. The breast and neck are scaled with horn something like tortoise shell."
Ithariel crossed to the table. Looking troubled, she regarded the Arrax man with eyes a mistier gray than her husband's, and said, "Talons or claws?"
Her beauty at last made an impression; the mountain born reddened behind his tattoos, and his voice became defensively surly. "Talons, Lady. Ones curved as sabers and long enough to pierce a man's chest."
Korendir left off his contemplation. He encompassed his wife's arrival with an uncharacteristically savorless glance, and said, "You know of this creature, Ithariel?"
Whitestorm's lady set her hands on the back of Haldeth's vacant chair. She directed her reply to the Arrax man as well as the husband poised too tautly by the windowseat. "The killer our guest has described fits nothing else but the Corrigon of elder legend. Such a beast should not exist. Dethmark's records claim the last of them died nine centuries ago, as witnessed by Morien's forbears."
The Arrax man banged the table, causing silverware to jump. "Would I voyage the breadth of Aerith just to speak lies to strangers?"
Prince Teadje woke from admiration and at last recalled diplomacy. "Peace, man," he murmured across a glare like swords; but the offense he strove to smooth over seemed not to trouble the mercenary.
"We believe you." All light-footed edginess, Korendir retrieved the parchment from the windowseat. The ribbons and seals shimmered faintly in the tremor of a hand no longer relaxed. "My Lady, were the records specific? How did the Corrigon replicate, and how came the last one to die?"
Ithariel turned the chair. She sat down with her eyes on her husband and pushed aside Haldeth's uneaten meal. The chink of plates and cutlery half masked her initial reply. "The females laid eggs in volcanic ash. The time of gestation was not known, but warmth triggers incubation and hatching. Unless they are discovered as chicks, a Corrigon is notoriously difficult to kill. The last one listed in the records was never vanquished. Apparently it perished of old age."
"After a lifetime of slaughter and destruction?" Korendir sounded incredulous.
Still looking at him, Ithariel shook her head. "The monster hunted the wastes of Ardmark and terrorized nothing but wereleopards."
"Well, this one makes orphans," the Arrax man interjected. "It preys upon helpless people, even as we speak. Come the winter, without caravans to bring supplies through the passes, my countrymen in the Hyadons will starve."
Korendir slipped into his seat. He smoothed the elaborate parchment on the cloth by Teadje's elbow, then lifted the wine carafe and refilled the Arrax man's goblet. An expression crossed his face that Ithariel had never seen, as with incisive clarity he said, "You have my sympathy. When the tide ebbs at dawn, I'll see you off with a letter of recommendation to an adventurer who lives down the coast. He has a fast sword and a knack for the unusual. He might take your contract."
The Arrax man shoved to his feet. His eyes glittered with fury as he seized his filled goblet, spat on the rim, then deliberately emptied the contents. Wine splashed his plate and reddened fine linen like blood.
Prince Teadje skidded back to safeguard his finery.
Unmindful of the spatters which stained his leathers, the mountain man finished acidly, "I have misjudged, and will waste no more words with a coward." Ignoring Prince Teadje's shocked outcry, he spun and hurled the goblet into the hearthfire. The crash of crystal masked his step as he stalked in hunched anger through the door.
Beneath the table edge, Ithariel set her hand on her husband's thigh. The muscles beneath her touch never so much as hardened at the insults. While Teadje floundered to make apology, the Master of Whitestorm said nothing to anyone at all.
* * *
Korendir walked the wilds along the clifftop until sundown. He returned before Megga could notice and complain that his supper stood in jeopardy of getting cold. Following the meal, he spent an absorbed hour entertaining his son. Together he and Ithariel tucked Callin into bed; they read as they always did over tea, but when candles burned low and eyes tired, they did not speak of the day's events, or of the guests whose needs Haldeth attended in another wing of the keep.
"I have everything in life that I desire," Korendir said simply, when he caught Ithariel watching him over the edge of her book. "All of my happiness is here."
Then, exactly as he had on the night she had been his bride, he arose and lifted her in his arms. He carried her down a flight of steps, and up three more to their bedchamber. There he shared without words exactly how deeply she pleased him.
Ithariel roused much later to the chill of a solitary bed. That caused her awareness to sharpen instantly. Since the setting of the wardstone at Whitestorm, Korendir's nightmares had ceased, as had the nocturnal visits to the clifftops that once had been his way to stave off sleep. Alarmed, Ithariel propped herself on one elbow and shook tangled hair from her eyes.
But her husband had not wandered far. She located his silhouette, framed in the square of the casement. He had donned shirt and hose against the cold. Perfectly still, he stared over starlit ocean toward a horizon not yet gray with dawn. By his stance, she knew he was frowning.
Ithariel repressed a shiver. She curbed her impulse to call him back to bed, and instead chose her words by intuition. "You know already that Stendarr will refuse Prince Teadje's contract."
Korendir recoiled, not entirely because she startled him; at times her enchantress's perception seemed to tap his deepest thoughts. He shifted position in the window. His head turned to reveal his profile, etched in shadow against sky. "Stendarr has courage enough. He's at his best while managing armies, and good because he loves war. An appeal that concerns a monster is outside his usual experience."
Ithariel felt a shudder jar through her, the same she had known the past winter in the hour after Callin's birth. All at once the darkness no longer seemed friendly. She sat up. Her hair tumbled loose on her shoulders as she reached for candle stand and striker.
From the window Korendir added, "This has given me a bad feeling from the first, and not through an Arrax man's insults."
Flame bloomed under Ithariel's fingers. She set the lit candle by the bedside, her face bathed in light like a cameo. She weighed her words carefully before she spoke; in her heart she knew that no others, ever, would suffice. Her voice shook all the same. "Why hide your heart? The man I married would be asking himself why the children of Arrax should suffer and die, while his own daughter should be born in protected safety."
He moved with a speed that startled and caught her into his embrace. "Ithariel! You, and Callin, and our baby yet to come are the joy upon which my life turns."
She wept then, from cruellest certainty. "But pleasures and wants do not make the measure of a man."
He caught her shaking shoulders, slid his hands up the sides of her neck until he cupped her face in his fingers. His eyes, meeting hers, were fearfully deep and steady. "Neth in his mercy, what gives me the right to set you and our child at risk? I might be killed for those other mens' children and wives, and forfeit the joy of my family."
Ithariel covered his hands with her own. She could not face the tautness in him, and almost, she could not speak. "Could you live with yourself if you didn't?"
The answer could be read in his stillness. Ithariel laid her cheek against his chest. Too much a part of his spirit to muddle his anguish with lies, she set herself instead to console. "High Morien before you thought not. You survived him. In the end, the children must inherit."
Korendir's arms tightened over her back. He held her fiercely, for long moments incapable of speech. "I'm amazed," he choked out at last. He caught his breath, changed tack, and tried afresh. "Ithariel, beloved, you are unique among women. You understand a truth that I never grasped until now."
Something within him let go, then; Ithariel felt his softness against her. He relaxed inside as he never had since before he lost peace to the Mhurgai.
Cut by a s
orrow more poignant than tears, Ithariel struggled for mastery of herself. The temptation was cruel, to renounce principle and say the one word that could keep him. At the same time aware how wide were the pitfalls, and how narrow the margin of his happiness, she fought her manner to lightness. "I knew all along that I'd married a maniac." She untied his points. "It's not dawn yet. Did you have to get dressed?"
As his hose slithered loose under her fingers, he buried his face in her hair. No word did he say but her name, and that, the way he phrased it, held meanings within meanings, but no regret. Compassion was his master, and his moment of final understanding had set all the universe in her hand.
* * *
In the hour that preceded daybreak, Prince Teadje awakened to a knock at the entrance of the guest suite. The Arrax man was dressed and already pacing the floor in his eagerness to be away from White Rock Head. It was he who minded the sleepy request of his prince, and stepped to unbar the door.
The portal opened to reveal Korendir, black-clad as always, but this time armed with sword and throwing knives, and a dagger inset with a cloudy jewel tucked in a sheath at his cuff. "The tide slacks in another hour. Your longboat has been summoned, if His Grace will arise and make ready."
The Arrax man's glower changed to critical interest. He began a remark, glanced at the mercenary's face, and chose silence. Korendir's manner held an edge that had not been evident the day before; in retrospect, instead of cowardice, the Arrax man recognized a quietude that should never in honor have been disturbed.
"Tell your prince the terms under which I take contract," instructed the Master of Whitestorm. "No coin will change hands. But for the death of the Corrigon, I demand your sovereign will set seal to an edict that abolishes slavery in the mines. There will be no more dwarves kept captive in the realm of High Kelair."
Upon sworn consent from the prince still cocooned in his blankets, the Master of Whitestorm closed the door. The final minutes before departure, he spent by himself with his son.
* * *
Autumn winds whipped the battlements of Whitestorm keep, and leaves torn from Thornforest flew scratching across crannies in the stone. Haldeth ventured out to make sure his apprentices had lighted the forge fire. A gust caught his cloak and forced a blast of chill through the fastening. The smith raised his eyes to curse the weather, and spotted the lady on the seaward embrasure with her hair unbound in the breeze.
The smith stopped short in his tracks.
Only one reason could bring the Lady Ithariel to stand lonely vigil above the sea.
Haldeth overcame disbelief and raced for the stairwell to the beachhead. Halfway down, with the breath burning in his lungs and every muscle protesting, he saw through the gap of an arrowslit that his effort came too late.
The envoy ship from High Kelair even now spread her canvas under the sky.
Nothing remained except to climb the battlements and consult with Ithariel; to try and comprehend what insane drive could lure Korendir from wife and child to his former feckless adventuring.
The lady waited until after the last sails vanished over the horizon. The ocean beneath the cliffs stretched empty and vast, and the wind held the mournful cries of gulls. Ithariel turned her head. A gust snatched back her hood, and morning sun lit her face. From the place where he waited by the postern gate, Haldeth saw her pain before she recognized his presence.
The smith never tried to stifle outrage. "Already you dread that he won't be coming back."
Ithariel started, her eyes like the mists off the beachheads in early spring. After a moment she nodded.
Haldeth clenched forge-toughened hands in bewilderment. "How could you let him go, then?"
The enchantress turned toward the sea, as if she could find answer within the rolling boom of the swells. "Sometimes a life must be given for life." When Haldeth moved to protest, she spun back and cut him short. "Don't speak of obligations. You're his friend, perhaps his only trusted one. Understand that Korendir is of High Morien's line, and White Circle enough to see his fate."
Haldeth gave vent to his bitterness. "He's a fool, and a son of a fool, if he could abandon his life here with you."
Ithariel looked back with all the coldness of her enchantress's heritage. "He has finally found his freedom. Would you take that peace away from him? Would you dare?"
The smith persisted in frustration. "What of the daughter you conceived in such joy, that may never know life beyond the womb?"
Ithariel battled to stem her sudden tears. "She is only one, Haldeth. And I knew what I chose on the day I bonded in marriage."
The smith no longer noticed the brisk wind. Dwarfed by the wide sky of Whitestorm, he shrugged at his own helplessness. "Could a man be worth so much?"
The enchantress raised brimming eyes and nodded. "That one, yes. Don't be sorry."
Too diminished to offer anything but the inadequate comfort of his embrace, the smith extended his arms. Ithariel gave in to grief and need. She leaned into his chest; fine-boned and fragile as a bird, she shed the tears she had restrained in Korendir's presence through the length of his last night at Whitestorm. And as he held her, Haldeth was plagued by the riddle that lingered like an echo from his dreams; as if somewhere a truth existed that forever escaped his grasp.
XXVI. High Kelair
Cold came early to the kingdoms in the north; frost etched jagged patterns across the windows of Prince Teadje's cabin on the morning his ship raised sail for return to High Kelair. The captain in command chose prudence over risk of winter gales. He charted a southerly course, to the undying disdain of the Arrax man, who claimed to read weather like a fisherman. Rushed beneath his tattoos, the mountain born expostulated in guttural tones of insult that blizzards would choke the passes before the ship could make port. Prince Teadje settled the dispute as the ship wore past White Rock Head and pitched to the roll of unprotected waters; His Grace turned precipitously green and retched in undignified postures over the rail. While servants rushed to escort him to his berth, the quartermaster minded his captain's barked command to maintain the chosen heading.
The Arrax man retired irritably to the maindeck; if he was galled to discover the prior presence of Korendir, his mood precluded complaint. Apparently inured to bad weather, he settled by the foremast pinrail and remained there despite the fact that his position interfered with the crew.
Tired of the mountain born's temper, the captain pretended tolerance. As the ship heeled into her beat to windward, spray flew in sheets over the bowsprit. The mettlesome man from the northpeaks became drenched and in time retired below. Only Korendir remained; quiet as shadow, he lingered at the rail long after the glimmer of Whitestorm's wardstone faded astern.
The envoy vessel reprovisioned at Fairhaven and left in driving snow. The gales closed in and whipped up whitecaps that battered at timber and sail; the calm between storms brought skies of glacial blue, and ice that jammed the running rigging. Sailors sent aloft to clear tackle borrowed the Arrax man's oaths; none of them understood mountain dialect, but guttural consonants and bitten syllables seemed suited to misery and salt water sores that chafed on stiffened canvas until every knuckle bled. By the time the ship backed sail in her home port, she showed the wear of a difficult passage. Her sails were patched, her men weary, and the pilot who boarded at the headland informed that the passes through the Hyadons were blocked by thirty-foot drifts.
Korendir absorbed this setback without reaction; except when he boarded the longboat with the Arrax man and the prince, he asked for a place at the oars. The craft crossed the bay with surprising speed. If the crewmen complained that their backs ached from matching the mercenary's stroke, his look quickly stilled their complaints.
Upon a wharf chipped clear of ice, the party was met by a herald in ceremonial colors and an escort of fifteen men at arms. The heir to the realm and his guests were marshaled through streets narrowed to tunneled alleys by piled snow. Craftsmen paused in their shovelling, and children blocked door
yards to stare as the royal cortege climbed a succession of switched back curves behind soldiers who cleared aside traffic. The captain snapped orders at their destination, and his company saluted in double columns before the gateway to the Palace of Kings.
Inside, warmed by a roaring fire, Korendir of Whitestorm paced to the casements and looked out on a town built in tiers against the hillsides. The islanders claimed that no land in High Kelair was created level, and the setting of their port affirmed the notion. Shops, temple spires, and gabled houses were built upon terraced foundations. All lay mantled under snow, looking like ornaments sugared over by the generous hand of a confectioner, except the smoke that trailed from level upon level of chimneys marred that image of charm. The Corrigon's predation had grown to trouble more than Arrax. Savaged by untimely freezing weather, the island's coastal settlements were threatened by a scarcity of wood.
Deeply morose, Prince Teadje's royal sire huddled amid cushions and toyed with a cut crystal game piece.
He was elderly. His hands shook, and the massive crown of state weighed heavily on his eggshell head. His jeweled cuffs flashed by firelight as he lamented that his summons to Korendir had been sent out too late to matter.
"Sledges with dogs could cross the passes, but not while the Corrigon flies." The sovereign tipped the chess pawn onto its side. "The last teams who tried were slaughtered. Only one driver returned to tell of their fate. He died soon after from his injuries."
The mountain born listened from a corner, expressionless behind tattooed sigils; only his eyes followed as a chancellor in embroidered robes resumed the recitation of bad news. "The town of Arrax is lost. The grain stores are nearly exhausted, and hunters who dare the wilds to set traps only become prey for the Corrigon. The creature has grown larger. It is said to fly over the rooftops by day and strike at the folk in the streets. Families have taken refuge in the mines, where they need not have fire to keep from freezing. But shelter is all the caverns can offer. The last messenger to report said that children were languishing from starvation."
