Relics of War
Page 24
Ishta nodded.
“Don’t wipe away those tears.”
She nodded again, and smiled feebly.
Lunch was a somber affair. Ishta did not say a word, and as soon as the meal was done and the table had been cleared she vanished into the room she shared with her sister.
The baron’s party had gone, leaving the west and north fields a mess; the Ethsharites had done considerably less damage. Grondar and his son went to work cleaning up the debris.
That took most of the afternoon, and for the most part father and son worked side by side in silence. The sun was low in the west when they headed back toward the barn to dump the bags of trash and put away their hoes and rakes.
They had just stepped inside when Grondar said, without preamble, “He’s not really dead, is he?”
Startled, Garander said, “What?”
“He’s not dead. It wouldn’t be that easy. Even if it was something Northern.”
“I don’t know,” Garander said.
“And the others—they wouldn’t have just left. They came here for Northern magic.”
“All his things were gone,” Garander said.
“But they both left,” his father insisted. “If one of them had found the body first, they would have taken everything, and the other side would have put up an argument.”
“Maybe they agreed to share.”
“That fast? No.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what you did, son. I don’t want to know. But he’s alive, isn’t he?”
Garander looked his father in the eye and said nothing.
Grondar nodded. “Good,” he said. “Don’t say anything. Then I can’t tell anyone anything, no matter how tired or drunk or careless I get. Does Ishta know? Because at lunch…” He did not finish his sentence.
“I didn’t tell her everything,” Garander said. “I didn’t want her to look too happy, but I didn’t want to make her miserable needlessly, either.”
“Well done. But she’ll need to be very careful if she visits him anymore.”
“She knows.”
Grondar nodded again.
“Good,” he said again.
And that was that.
Epilogue
Garander convinced Ishta not to go looking for Tesk until the spell had worn off, and for once she did as she was told. The spell wore off on schedule, though, and within three days of the staged death scenes Ishta and Tesk were once again chatting happily in the forest.
Despite concerns about what might happen now that the shatra was gone, no mizagars were seen in the area then or for many years thereafter.
There were no reports of any great magical discoveries in Varag or Sardiron; instead there were occasional stories of sorcerers dying in various horrible ways when their experiments went wrong.
No reports came from Ethshar of the Sands by any ordinary routes, but every so often thereafter Garander would have a dream in which Ellador would appear to him to update him on the latest news, or sometimes simply to talk. He had no proof at first that these dreams were magical sendings, but Garander was certain that they were just that; the dream-Ellador said he was using something called the Spell of Invaded Dreams to let Garander know what was happening.
Lord Edaran, the dream-Ellador said, had wanted to send magicians to retrieve the shatra’s body, but had been dissuaded by Ellador and his friends, who had reported that the body had been destroyed.
Lord Edaran had also talked about perhaps sending a punitive expedition into the baronies to avenge the shatra’s death, which he somehow blamed on the incompetence of Lord Dakkar’s magicians, but by this time word had reached the other two overlords of what was going on. Azrad and Gor made it very clear to their young partner that there was to be no war unless the barons were actually stupid enough to invade the Hegemony—which they were not.
Experimentation on the captured equipment, Ellador reported, was conducted with extreme care, using every sort of protective spell. Whether anything ever came of it he could not say.
In time, Grondar and Shella’s three children grew up. Garander remained a farmer, becoming an equal partner with his parents; he met and eventually married a merchant’s daughter by the name of Peretta the Clever, and became the father of five children—three daughters and two sons.
Shella the Younger married Karn Kolar’s son, but the marriage did not last; after she left him she wound up living in Sardiron, where she became a noted dressmaker, married a captain in the city guard, and bore him three sons.
Tesk remained in the forest, visiting occasionally with Garander, Ishta, and later Peretta; neither Grondar nor either of the Shellas ever saw him again.
And Ishta, with Ellador’s assistance as arranged in Garander’s dreams, went to Ethshar of the Sands, where she apprenticed to a demonologist. Her original intent may have been to find a way to separate Tesk’s human and demonic parts, but although she was successful in her chosen field, and visited him every so often, she never achieved that particular feat.
About the Author
Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of four dozen novels and over a hundred short stories, including the Hugo-winning “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers.” He has been a full-time writer for more than thirty years and lives in Takoma Park, Maryland with his wife and an overweight cat.
His web page is at www.watt-evans.com, and readers of this book may also want to check out www.ethshar.com.