by Victor Milán
Once they had reached comparative safety outside Thay, Father Pelletyr had performed divinations on the head. Its nature was so arcane that the cleric had been able to learn little of it, other than that it was definitely not evil in nature, which was the thing Zaranda had been hoping to learn. There was enough unbridled evil in the world, and she didn’t care to add to it. Neither did she want to have gone to such hair-raising lengths to obtain the head only to have to cast it into the Inner Sea. But all that left her with more than a slight suspicion that all the bronze skull truly contained was beguiling badinage, that the head was nothing more than a practical joke, a long-dead mage’s monument to himself in the form of a last enduring laugh.
“Good night,” Zaranda said again, and stretched herself out on the bed. Its softness, just firm enough to avoid bogginess, enveloped her like an angel’s embrace. She sighed with pleasure. Not for her was Stillhawk’s notion that the best bed was hard ground.
“But you’re a magician,” the head almost whined. “I can teach you spells beyond imagining.”
“I gave that up. Thank you. Good night.”
“Don’t you feel like taking your gown off? It’s fearfully stuffy in here.”
For answer Zaranda rolled on her side, facing away from the head, and pulled the counterpane, which had been part of the Tuigan chieftain’s trove and was inexplicably covered with embroidered elks and penguins, to her chin.
“Surely you are not by nature so grim and cheerless, Zaranda Star.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not. Good night.” And she gestured out the candles.
The tower of Gold Keep was still visible away up the valley behind them, shining like its namesake in the morning sun, when Vander Stillhawk turned the head of his blood bay back and signed to the column behind him, Smell smoke.
“Me, too,” Goldie said. “Wood, cloth, straw.”
“A farmhouse,” Zaranda said grimly. Her eyelids were ever-so-slightly puffy. For all the welcoming softness of her bed, her sleep had been fitful, troubled by dreams of blackness gathering like a thunderhead on the western horizon, and whispers at once seductive and sinister.
Father Pelletyr came jouncing up on his little donkey. Zaranda’s stablehands had bathed the beast and plaited colorful ribbons into its mane and tail. Goldie forbore to pin her ears at it.
“Zaranda, what seems to be the difficulty?” the priest asked.
She pointed. A sunflower of smoke was growing rapidly in the sky to the northwest, pale gray against pale blue.
The priest clutched his Ilmater medallion. “Merciful heavens,” he said.
Zaranda turned Goldie sideways on the wagon-rut path that wound its way through short spring-green grass. “Balmeric! Eogast!” she shouted to her sergeant of guards and her dwarven drover-in-chief. “Get the mules off the road and the men into a defensive circle around them. If any armed strangers come within arbalest range, drop them!”
“Must it then be raiders, Zaranda?” Farlorn asked in his lilting baritone, riding up on his gray mare. “It could be some farmer’s been dilatory about cleaning the chimney of his cot and set his thatch alight.”
“This is Tethyr,” she said grimly. She turned Goldie and booted her after Stillhawk, who was already riding at a slant up the ridge to their right. The ranger had unslung his elven longbow from his shoulder. Farlorn shrugged and spurred his mare to follow.
“What of me?” the priest called.
“Stay and watch the caravan,” Zaranda called back over her shoulder.
“Be careful, Zaranda!”
“You’re wasting your breath, good father!” Farlorn shouted cheerfully back.
She charged for a quarter mile across country that had not entirely settled from the Snowflake foothills into Tethyrian flatland. The ground rolled like gentle ocean swells. Zaranda crested a rise and saw a prosperous farmhouse of at least three rooms. The walls were stone, but the insides and most of the thatch roof burned fiercely.
A woman ran toward Zaranda, rough brown homespun skirts hiked high, round cheeks flushed with fear and exertion. As Zaranda watched, a horseman in blood-sheened leather armor rode up behind her and drove a lance into her back. She uttered a despairing wail and pitched forward on her face.
Zaranda gave forth a wordless falcon-scream of fury, whipped her sword from her scabbard, and spurred Goldie forward. Blue witchfire crackled along the saber’s curved blade.
The mounted man had his back to her, tugging at his lance and laughing at the way it made the woman’s body move across the ground. Intent on his game, he had no hint of danger. Three rough-clad men in the hen yard, though, spotted Zaranda and loosed a volley of arrows at her from their short bows.
It was a fatal mistake. Like the elves who had raised him and trained him, Stillhawk was no horse-bowman. He had already dropped to the grass without reining in his bay, and was running off his momentum with his long brown lean-thewed legs. Even as he ran, he nocked an arrow and released, then, running, reached into his quiver for another.
The arrows that struck the second and third short bowmen down were already in flight when the two men turned their heads to gape at the broad-headed arrow that had transfixed the first one’s throat.
The short-bow volley fell wide, arrows hissing into the grass like snakes. “Randi, they’re shooting at us,” Goldie panted. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
They were almost upon the horseman, who still hadn’t freed his weapon from his victim. Ignoring her mare, Zaranda screamed, “Look me in the eye before you die, you scum!”
The horseman was quick on the uptake. He let go his trapped lance immediately, and was drawing his broadsword even as he turned. He saw Zaranda charging not twenty feet away, bared yellow teeth, and flung his sword high for a downward stroke.
Zaranda dug her heels into Goldie’s flanks, urging her into a final surge of speed. As the mare dashed past the larger horse, Zaranda slashed forehand beneath the upraised arm. Her magic-imbued blade sliced almost effortlessly through stained leather, meat, and bone with a humming, crackling sound.
The raider fell, his final expression one of bewilderment.
“I hate that sour-milk smell,” Goldie complained as Zaranda reined her in, almost in the burning cottage’s yard. “Why did you have to get a magic sword imbued with lightning? It’s not as if it actually throws bolts or anything.… Uh-oh.”
The last remark was elicited by the fact that, in spite of being well and truly on fire, the cot was disgorging marauders, half a dozen of them, casting away loot bundled into pillowcases in order to draw their blades. They were dirty, unkempt, and unshaven, dressed in rags and tag ends of armor, and their weapons were in as dire need of cleaning as their teeth. The armaments looked serviceable enough, despite their lamentable condition.
Three more horsemen came drumming out from around the far side of the burning house. One of them had two wing-fluttering hens, one black, one white-and-black checked, tied by the feet to the pommel of his saddle. He brandished a sword, as did one of his mounted fellows. The third swung the spiked, fist-sized ball of an aspergillum-style morningstar on its chain about his helmeted head.
Zaranda winced; they were devilish things to defend against.
The riders showed cunning. Rather than rushing straight at the mounted interloper, they spurred their horses wide, hoping to pin her against the house and the semicircle of footmen. Zaranda just had time to wheel Goldie about and dart for safety.
But that was never her style.
“Head down, babe,” she murmured to her mare, and nudged her hard with her heels.
“You don’t want me—”
“Go!”
The golden palomino mare put her head down and lunged forward—straight for the doorway of the flaming cottage. Zaranda laid her magic saber about her, looping left and right so that the blade formed wings that shimmered silver gossamer in the morning sun. Utterly astonished by her mad forward rush, the footmen broke to either side. She felt Crackle
tongue’s enchanted steel bite flesh gratifyingly as she passed.
Then she laid her body forward along Goldie’s arched neck, and the mare lunged into the building, trailing a despairing cry of “Za-ran-daaa!” Smoke drooled upward over the lintel of the doorframe, caressing Zaranda’s nose and eyes with stinging fingers. Then they were inside, hooves thumping on earth packed hard and soaked with beasts’ blood in classic Tethyrian country fashion, dried into a smooth hard maroon surface like glazed tile and covered with rush straw. Flames ran like dancing rat spirals up the ornately carved posts that upheld the roof, and wound about the roof beams a handspan above Zaranda’s unarmored back. She felt their heat, heard their lustful crackle, felt embers fall on the back of her neck, smelled her own hair start to burn.
As she hoped, there was a kitchen door. They burst through into the relative cool of open. Woman and mare released the breath they had been holding and filled their lungs with blessed clean air. Zaranda let go the reins, which she held only from long equestrian habit, to bat away the sparks lodged in Goldie’s mane and her own hair.
“Aren’t you getting too old for this, Randi?” gasped the mare.
Zaranda threw back her hair and laughed like a schoolgirl. “No!”
Two horsemen appeared around the stone corner to Zaranda’s left. Zaranda brought Goldie round to meet them. Then the sudden backward pivot of the mare’s long ears alerted her that the third one had circled to take her from behind.
“Not so fast, buster,” Goldie said as the third horse, a white stallion, ran up on her. “We hardly know each other.”
She launched a sudden savage kick with both rear feet. The stallion screamed and shied back as a steel-shod hoof gouged a divot from his shoulder. His rider, the man with the mace-on-a-stick, groaned and sagged, clutching his thigh. Goldie’s other hoof had caught him square, with luck breaking the femur or at the least giving him a deep bone bruise and an excellent set of cramps.
With one foe out of the fight, however temporarily, Zaranda charged the other two. The rider on Zaranda’s left sat a stubby little pony a hand shorter than Goldie, who wasn’t as dainty as she effected to believe. Zaranda put her mare’s shoulder right into the smaller beast’s chest, rocking the pony back on its haunches and fouling its rider’s sword strokes, while Zaranda traded ringing cuts with the man to her right.
The bandit swordsman had greater strength, but Zaranda was used to that. Though she was tall and strong, most men were stronger. Skill and speed were her edges. In an exchange that flashed with more than sunlight, she took a nick in the shoulder but left the man’s right side in ribbons and his cheek laid open, streaming blood into a matted gray-flecked beard. Frantically, he sidestepped his horse away from the blade storm.
All this time Goldie had been driving the pony back, trying to force its rump against the house’s stone flank, and grunting mightily to let Zaranda know how hard she was working. The rider, who had a gap in his teeth and a right eye that looked at random out across the bean-fields, finally hit the notion of yanking his mount’s head to the right and trying to slide past the mare.
As he did so, he hacked cross-body at Zaranda’s face, hoping to down her while her attention was on his comrade. “Randi, duck!” shouted Goldie.
Zaranda threw herself to her right, letting her left foot slip from the stirrup, snagging the knee on the pommel to keep herself from leaving the saddle entirely. She whipped Crackletongue over and across her body, deflecting the broadsword so that it skimmed her rump and thunked into her saddle’s cantle. With a backhand slash, she laid the man’s face open. He screamed and dropped his sword, clutching his face with his hands.
With a bellow of triumph, the grizzle-bearded man spurred his horse at her, bringing his own blade up for the kill. A hissing sound, and he crossed his eyes to look at the bright, slim tip of Farlorn’s rapier, which suddenly protruded from his breast. The blade slid inside him like a serpent’s tongue, and out his back. He slumped from the saddle.
The cockeyed man had fallen to the grass beside the kitchen stoop and lay curled in a ball, sobbing.
“Thanks,” said Zaranda with a nod to Farlorn. The bard grinned and saluted her with a flourish of his blade.
Zaranda looked at the man with the morningstar, who sat a wary ten yards off, massaging his thigh. “Surrender, and we’ll let you live,” she told him, “as long as you’re willing to answer a few questions.”
The man grimaced in pain and licked greasy lips. “Does that means just as long as I’m answering questions?” he asked.
“Zaranda,” a familiar voice called timidly from the farmhouse’s far side. “Could you, ah—could you show yourself, please?”
Zaranda turned and frowned at Farlorn. “Father Pelletyr?” she said. He shrugged. The morningstar man took advantage of their distraction to spur his horse away behind some apple trees covered with tiny green buds of fruit.
Farlorn dismounted to see to the man Zaranda had struck down. She rode Goldie back around the side of the cot, swinging well wide to avoid flames billowing from window and roof.
On the last grassy rise Zaranda and her comrades had crossed before hitting the farmhouse, a lone rider sat. He was a vast man, a good eight feet tall, astride a horse at least eighteen hands high and as broad as a beer-cart, which might have served a northern knight as a destrier but more likely was born to pull a plow. The man wore a hauberk of tarnished scale armor and, across one mountainous shoulder, bore a great double-bitted battle-axe with a six-foot helve. The restless wind made the hair of his topknot stream like a greasy black pennon.
Beside him, four ragged men on foot had Father Pelletyr by the arms. One of them held a knife blade, crusted with rust and ominous dark stains, against the cleric’s throat.
“Zaranda,” the priest said apologetically, “these gentlemen claim to be tax-collectors. If they’re about their lawful business, it’s wrong of us to interfere.”
Farlorn had emerged from behind the house on his dapple-fannied gray. He answered Zaranda’s query-look with a shrug to indicate the man she’d struck was no longer an issue. Then he glanced up the rise, and a smile quirked his handsome lips.
“Our good father was always one for following instructions,” he murmured.
“Who dares,” the monstrous rider bellowed, “interfere with the servitors of Baron Pundar on their lawful business?”
“Zaranda Star dares that and more,” Zaranda declared. “Especially since I happen to be Countess Morninggold. Father, this beast’s misled you; this is still County Morninggold, and these men no more than looters—and murderers.”
She tossed her head haughtily, making her namesake blaze flash in the sun. “Who dares to name that hedge-robber Pundar of Little Consequence ‘baron’—and to prey upon my people?”
The morningstar man with the injured leg had circled round and now rode up to join his apparent leader. He stopped and turned back to the house. “Pundar is too a baron,” he called through cupped hands. “He has a piece of paper from the capital that proves it!”
“The capital?” Zaranda said, half to herself. “Since when is there a capital in Tethyr?”
“Why, Zazesspur—ow!”
The giant man had ridden a few steps forward and with a great backhanded clout knocked the morningstar man from the saddle.
“I do the talking here,” he roared. “I am Togrev the Magnificent, lord high commander of the armed forces of Pundaria! We claim these lands by ancient right, as approved and attested by Zazesspur.”
Zaranda and Farlorn had begun to ride forward. They could see the house’s front now. Two of the footmen lay in unmoving lumps in the pigsty; the other four stood with hands up, looking nervously at Stillhawk, who stood covering them with an arrow nocked.
“By rights,” Zaranda told Togrev, “we should hang the lot of you as the murderous bandit scum you are.”
“You forget,” the lord high commander said, and gestured with a black-nailed hand. A few feet from the captive cler
ic the little ass had its head down, cropping obliviously at the sweet spring grass. “I have your priest.”
“For all the good that does you,” Zaranda said. “It’s poor practice to negotiate for hostages, and as a rule I won’t do it.”
Father Pelletyr squirmed his right arm free enough to touch himself four times on the breast in the sign of the rack on which Ilmater suffered. Then he crossed his hands before his breast as if they were bound and rolled his eyes heavenward, accepting. The cleric had a notable reluctance to face physical danger, but this was martyrdom, which made all the difference in the world.
“However,” Zaranda said, stopping her horse twenty yards downslope from the huge man, “somebody needs to be left alive to tell that mound of ankheg droppings Pundar that if he troubles my people again he’ll wake some fine spring night with a fireball in his lap.”
“And who would cast such a fireball?” demanded Togrev in an avalanche rumble.
“I would.”
The morningstar man had rolled over and was sitting in the grass and rubbing the back of his neck. “She’s a witch, Togrev,” he said. “She knows all kind of wild magics. Beware her spells.”
“Listen to the man,” Zaranda said.
The huge man frowned at her. His brows beetled impressively. “Half-ogre, by the smell of him,” Goldie muttered as the wind backed. “Ick.”
“What will you do, then?” Togrev demanded.
“Kill you in single combat.”
“You want me to fight that?” Goldie demanded in a whisper, nodding at the gigantic plowhorse. “He’s as clumsy as a barrel of boulders, but if he ever connects, sweet Sune preserve me!”
Togrev frowned more impressively still, as if there were something here he didn’t quite get. “Why should I go along with that?” he asked after a few heartbeats.
