Valdemar 09 - [Mage Winds 01] - Winds of Fate

by Mercedes Lackey

  Not that they need “toy” Companions, Elspeth thought with amusement. They have the real thing following them around by the nose every time Mother takes them with her into the Field. No doubts there about whether or not they’ll be Chosen!

  In fact, Gwena had remarked more than once that the only question involved would be which Companion did the Choosing. There were apparently a number in the running. :Mark my words,: she’d said with amusement. :There are going to be fights over this in a couple of years.:

  But that made gift giving both harder and easier. Trying to find—or make—absolutely identical presents in dif fering colors had been driving Elspeth (and everyone else) to distraction. They were able to pick out the most amazing discrepancies and turn them into points of contention over whose present was “better.” Finally, though, she’d hit on the notion of making a mold and copying a successful piece. Her first effort had been a pair of dragon-lamps, or rather, night-lights; comical, roly-poly fellows who gently burned lamp-oil at a wick in their open mouths. Those had been such a hit that Elspeth had decided to try dolls, specifically, dolls that looked as much like the twins themselves as she—who was not exactly a portrait sculptor—could manage.

  It’s a good thing that they’re in that vague sort of “child-shaped” stage, she thought wryly, as she surveyed the row of greenware heads waiting to be cleaned of mold-marks and sorted for discards. I doubt if I could produce anything more detailed than that.

  Well, dressing the completed dolls in miniatures of the twins’ favorite outfits would take care of the rest. And providing the appropriate accessories, of course. She would have to appeal for help on that. To Talia for the outfits, since she could probably bribe the Queen’s Own with an offer of another doll for Talia’s son Jemmie; her plain-sewing was as good as many of the seamstresses attached to the Palace staff, though her embroidery was still “enough to make a cat laugh,” as she put it. To Keren for the rest. Lyra was in a horse-crazy phase at the moment, a bit young for that, perhaps, but the twins— and Jemmie—were precocious in most areas. Kris had gone mad for the Guard; half the time, when asked, he would assert that he wanted to be a Guard-Captain when he grew up (which usually made any nearby Companions snort). Tiny swords and miniature riding boots were a little out of Elspeth’s line, but perhaps Keren or Sherrill, Keren’s lifemate, could arrive at a solution.

  The first three heads weren’t worth bothering with; bubbles in the slip had flawed the castings badly enough to crack when they were fired. The fourth was perfect; the fifth, possible, and the sixth—

  The arrangement of the window and door in the shed made it a regrettable necessity that she sit with her back to the door. That being the case, she had left the hinges unoiled. It simply was not possible to open the door, however carefully, without at least some noise, however slight.

  She froze as she heard the faintest of telltale squeaks from behind her, then continued examining the head as if she had heard nothing. A lightning-quick mental probe behind her revealed that it was Skif—again—at the door. This time his thoughts were unguarded. He assumed that she had already put this afternoon’s lessons out of her mind, a little tired and careless, here in the heart of the Palace grounds.

  Not a chance, friend, she thought. And as he slipped through the door, she shifted her weight off the stool she had been using, and hooked one foot around one of the legs.

  At a moment when he was poised and unbalanced, she pulled the stool over, whirled, and kicked it under his feet, all with a single motion.

  He was hardly expecting opposition, much less that he would be on the defensive. He lost his balance as his feet got tangled up with the stool and couldn’t recover. He fell over backward with a crash of splintering wood as her stool went with him, landing ingloriously on his rear. She stood over him, shaking her head, as he blinked up at her and grinned feebly.

  “Uh—”

  “Ever heard of knocking?” she asked. She picked up her stool without offering him a hand and made a face. He’d broken two of the bottom rungs and loosened all four of the legs, and it had not been that sturdy to begin with.

  “You owe me a new chair,” she said, annoyed all out of proportion to the value of the stool. “That wasn’t just a dirty trick, Skif, that was dangerous. You could have broken some of my best pieces, too.”

  “Almost broke some of mine,” he grumbled. “You aren’t going to get an apology, if that’s what you’re looking for. You knew very well we’d be springing these surprise attacks on you.”

  But not in the one place I can relax, she thought, seething with resentment. Not in the only place I can get away from everything and everyone.

  “You still owe me, lout,” she said stubbornly, righting the stool and rocking it to check how wobbly it was going to be. She sat on it and folded her arms, making no attempt to disguise how put out she was. “You still could have broken something. I don’t ask for much, Skif, and I give up a lot. I think it’s only fair to be off-limits when I’m out here.”

  He didn’t say, Will an attacker go along with that? and he didn’t give her a lecture, which mollified her a little. Instead, he grinned ingenuously and pulled himself up from the floor, dusting off his white uniform once he reached his feet. “I really have to congratulate you,” he said. “You did a lot better than I expected. I deliberately came after you when I knew you were tired and likely to be careless.”

  “I know,” she said crisply, and watched his bushy eyebrows rise as he realized what that meant. First, that she’d detected him soon enough to make a mental test of him, and second that she’d gone ahead and read his thoughts when she knew who it was. The second was a trifle unethical; Heralds were not supposed to read other’s thoughts without them being aware of the fact. But if he was going to violate her precious bit of privacy, she was going to pay him back for it. Let him wonder how much else I read while I was peeking and sweat about it a little.

  “Oh.” He certainly knew better than to chide her for that breach of privacy at this point. “I’ll see you later, I guess.”

  “You’d better have a new stool with you,” she said, as he backed hastily out the door, only now aware that she was still clutching the much-abused doll’s head. She looked at it as soon as he was out of sight. Whatever shape it had been in before this, it was ruined now. She disgustedly tossed it into the discard bucket beside her bench.

  It wasn’t until she had a half dozen usable heads lined up on the bench in front of her, and had smashed the rejects, that she felt as if her temper was any cooler. Cleaning them was a dull but exacting task, precisely what she wanted at the moment. She didn’t want to see or talk to anyone until her foul mood was gone.

  So when she felt the stirring of air behind her that meant the door had cracked open again, she was not at all amused.

  I’m going to kill him.

  She readied a mental bolt, designed to hit him as if she had shouted in his ear—when her preliminary Mind-touch told her something completely unexpected. This was not Skif—or Kerowyn, or anyone else she knew.

  And she ducked instinctively as something shot past, overhead, and landed with a solid thunk point-first in the wall above the bench.

  A hunting knife, ordinary and untraceable. It quivered as she stared up at it, momentarily stunned. Then her training took over before the other could react to the fact that he had missed.

  She kicked the stool at him as she rolled under the bench and came up on the other side. He kicked it out of the way, slammed the door shut behind him, and dropped the bar; a few heartbeats later, the door shuddered as Gwena hit it with her hooves.

  Now I wish this place wasn’t quite so sturdy-

  The stranger turned with another knife in his hands. Gwena shrieked and renewed her attack on the door. He ignored the pounding and came straight for Elspeth.

  With her lesson so fresh in her mind, she flung the first thing that came to hand at him—the half-cleaned doll’s head. It didn’t do any damage, but it made a
hollow popping sound which distracted him enough so that she could get clear of the bench, get to where he’d kicked the stool, and snatch it up. Using it as a combination of shield and lance, she rushed him, trying to pin him against the abused door with the legs.

  But the battering the stool had taken had weakened the legs too much to hold; his single blow broke the legs from the seat and left her holding a useless piece of flat board. Or almost useless; she threw it at his head, forcing him to duck, and giving her a chance to grab something else as Gwena’s hooves hit the door again.

  That “something else” proved to be one of her better pots, a lovely, graceful, two-handled vase. But she sacrificed it without a second thought, snatching it off the shelf and smashing it against the wall of the shed, leaving her with a razor-sharp shard. A knife-edge, with a handle to control it.

  She took the initiative, as he started at the crash of shattering crockery, and threw herself at him.

  He wasn’t expecting that either, and she caught him completely off guard. He tried to grapple with her, and she let him, sacrificing her own mobility for one chance to get in with that bit of pottery in her right hand.

  He grabbed her, but it was too late to stop her. Before he realized what she meant to do with that bit of crockery, she slashed it across his throat, cutting it from ear to ear, as Gwena’s hooves hit the door and it shattered inward.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Kerowyn asked, as she wiped Elspeth’s forehead with a cold, damp cloth. Elspeth finally finished retching and licked her lips, tasting salt and bile, before she nodded shakily.

  “I think so,” she replied, closing her eyes and leaning back against the outer wall of the shed. The others had arrived to find her on her hands and knees in the grass, covered in blood—not her own—with Gwena standing over her protectively as she emptied her stomach into the bushes.

  Her stomach still felt queasy, as if she might have another bout at any moment. No matter that she had seen death before—had even killed her share of the enemy in the last war with Hardom—she’d taken down Lord Or thallen with her own two hands and one of Skif’s throwing knives.

  That wasn’t close, not this close. I was dropping arrows into people from a distance. I threw a knife from across the room. Not like this, where he bled all over me and looked up at me and—

  Her stomach heaved again, and she quelled the thoughts. “Who was he?” she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, trying to get her mind on something else. “How did he find out where I was? And how did he get past the guards?”

  “I don’t know the answers to your second and third questions,” Kero replied, as Elspeth closed her eyes and concentrated on the coolness against her forehead. “But I can tell you the answer to the first. There’s a spider-web brand on his palm. He’s one of the followers of the Cold God. They hire themselves out as assassins, and they’re very expensive because they don’t care if they get caught. He was either providing a legacy for a family, or doing penance for some terrible sin. If you hadn’t killed him, he’d have killed himself.” Kero dropped the cloth and sat back on her heels, and Elspeth opened her eyes and gaped at the older Herald, her nausea forgotten.

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that!” she exclaimed.

  Kero nodded. “Not too many people have; the Cold One’s advocates come from farther south than anyone I know has been except Geyr. He’s the one who told me about them, after the last try at your mother, and told me what to look for. Said that if Ancar really got desperate and knew how to contact them, he might try hiring one of the Cold Blades.” She frowned. “I didn’t take the threat seriously, and I should have—and believe me, it won’t happen again. Frankly, you were lucky—they usually aren’t that careless. And there is nothing, nothing, more dangerous than a suicidal fanatic.”

  “But—how did he get in here, in the gardens?” she asked, bewildered. “How could he? We have guards everywhere!”

  Kero frowned even harder. “If Geyr’s to be believed, by m-m-m-m-magic,” she said, forcing the word out around the compulsion that seemed to overtake all Heralds when discussing anything but the mental Gifts and the Truth-Spell. “There’re m-mages among the Cold Ones that give them a kind of invisibility. My grandmother could do it—make people think that when they looked at her, they were actually seeing someone they knew and trusted and expected to be there. Works with the mind, like Mindspeech, but it’s set up with a spell. Dangerous stun—and now the guards are going to have to double-check everyone they think they know. There’re going to be some unhappy folks, unless I miss my guess....”

  He either underestimated me, or he was inexperienced, she thought soberly, as Kero left her to talk quietly with some of the Guard who were dealing with the body. And—I don’t think we’re ever going to find out how Ancar found him because I have the funny feeling that he used magic.

  She shivered and stood up, her knees shaking. Her Whites were ruined-not that she’d ever want to wear this set again. Magic again. Whatever had protected Valdemar in the past, it was not proof against Ancar anymore.

  Chapter Two

  DARKWIND

  Darkwind k‘Sheyna balanced his bondbird Vree on his shoulder, and peered out across the sea of grass below him with a touch of—regret? Envy? A little of both, perhaps. From where he stood, the earth dropped in a steep cliff more than a hundred man-lengths to the floor of the Dhorisha Plains—a formidable barrier to those who meant the Shin’a‘in and their land any ill. It took knowledge and skill to find the paths down into the Plains, and from there, intruders were visible above the waist-high grass for furlongs.

  His bondbird lifted narrow, pointed wings a little in the warm, grass-scented updraft that followed the cliff. :Prey,: Vree’s thought answered his own, framed in the simple terms of the bondbird’s understanding. Not so much a thought as a flood of images; tree-hares, mice, quail, rabbits, all of them from the viewpoint of the forestgyre as they would appear just before the talons struck.

  Prey, indeed. Any would-be hunter attempting to penetrate the Plains without magic aid would find himself quickly turned hunted. The land itself would fight him; he would be visible to even a child, he would never guess the locations of seeps and springs, and without landmarks that he would understand, that intruder would become disoriented in the expanse of grass and gently rolling hills. The guardians of the Plains, and the scouts that patrolled the border, had half their work done for them by the Plains themselves.

  Darkwind sighed and turned away, back to his own cool, silent forest. No such help for him—other than the fact that the eastern edge of k‘Sheyna territory bordered the Plains. But to the south and west lay forest, league upon league of it, and all of it dangerous.

  :Sick,: complained Vree. Darkwind agreed with him. Magic contaminated those lands, a place Outlanders called the “Pelagir Hills” with no notion of just how much territory fell under that description. Magic flowed wild and twisted through the earth, a magic that warped and shaped everything that grew there—sometimes for the better, but more often for the worse.

  Darkwind took Vree onto his wrist, the finger-long talons biting into the leather of his gauntlet as Vree steadied himself, and launched him into the trees to scout ahead. The forestgyre took to the air gladly; unlike his bondmate, Vree enjoyed the scouting forays. Hunting was no challenge to a bondbird, and there was only so much for Vree to do within the confines of k‘Sheyna Vale’s safe territory. Scouting and guarding were what Vree had been bred for, and he was never happier than when flying ahead of Darkwind on patrol.

  Darkwind didn’t mind the scouting so much, even if the k‘Sheyna scouts were spread frighteningly thin-after all, he was a vayshe druvon. Guard, scout, protector, he was all of those.

  It’s the magic, he told himself—not for the first time. If it wasn’t for the magic—

  Every time he encountered some threat to k‘Sheyna that used magic or was born of it, and had to find some way other than magic to counter that threa
t, it scorched him to the soul. And worse was his father’s attitude when he returned—scorn for the mage who would abandon his power, and a stubborn refusal to understand why Darkwind had done so....

  If I could go back in time and kill those fools that set this loose in the world, I would do so, and murder them all with my bare hands, he thought savagely. His anger at those long-dead ancestors remained, as he chose a tree to climb, looking for one he had not used before.

  A massive goldenoak was his choice this time; he slipped hand-spikes out of his belt without conscious thought, and pulled the fingerless, backless leather gloves on over his palms. The tiny spikes set into the leather wouldn’t penetrate the bark of the tree enough to leave places for fungus or insects to lodge, but it would give him a little more traction on the trunk. As would the shakras-hide soles of his thin leather boots.

  In moments he was up in the branches. The game-trail along the edge of the territory lay below him. When two-legged intruders penetrated k‘Sheyna, most of the time they sought trails like this one.

  When scouts patrolled, it was often up here, where the trails could be seen, but where the scouts themselves were invisible.

  He shaded his eyes and chose a route through the next three forest giants by means of intersecting limbs, stowing his climbing-spikes and removing his double-ended climbing tool from the sheath on his back. Then he picked his way through the foliage, walking as surefootedly on the broad, swaying branch as if he were on the ground, pulling another branch closer with the hook end of his tool and hopping from his goldenoak to the limb of a massive candle-pine just as the branch began to bow beneath his weight. He followed the new branch in to the trunk, then back out again to another conifer, this time stowing the tool long enough to leap for the branch above him and swing himself up onto it.