Steel and Stone

by Ellen Porath

  “We don’t need your help,” the half-elf said.

  Caven Mackid laughed. “Do you think I’d let Kitiara get away again? What’s to stop her from collecting the reward money and slipping away from us both?” He reined in the stallion, then guided the horse between Dauntless and Obsidian, who edged away. Wode, looking bored, took up a position at the rear. “Let’s go,” Mackid said.

  There seemed to be no recourse. The four rode on in silence, speaking only when Caven’s stallion nipped at the other horses when they drew too close.

  “Where did you get such a beast?” Tanis finally asked.

  “On Mithas.” Mithas, on the far side of the Blood Sea of Istar, was the home of the minotaurs, the half-man, half-bull creatures noted for their ferocity in warfare and their willingness to fight for pay.

  Caven grinned and answered the unspoken question. “I won Maleficent in a game of bones. From his minotaur master.” Mackid threw back his head and laughed. “As if anyone could be master to Maleficent! The creature barely tolerates me, and that’s only because he knows I’m as stubborn and black-hearted as he.”

  Minotaurs were notorious for slaying outsiders. The man had taken the ultimate risk in challenging a minotaur, even in something as seemingly harmless as a game of bones.

  Caven nodded at Dauntless. “Where’d you get that … carnival pony, half-elf?” Tanis felt annoyance rise like a boil. Dauntless had taken the half-elf through dozens of encounters, facing all manner of dangers, from highwaymen to goblins. If he also was gentle enough to trust with children, what of it?

  But the four would have to keep some peace if they were to bring back the ettin. Thus Tanis didn’t respond to Caven’s jibe; he merely nudged Dauntless into the ragged gait that passed for the gelding’s canter and moved into the lead.

  It was time to find an ettin.

  Chapter 8

  The Portent

  “DREENA.”

  Kai-lid struggled in the web between sleeping and waking. The voice that spoke was ghostly, as if it could belong to either world.

  “Dreena.”

  She knew the voice, or one just like it. She’d heard it as a large-eyed child learning simple spell-casting at her mother’s knee. But Kai-lid’s mother was dead.

  Still the voice persisted. Kai-lid opened her eyes to total darkness. Sitting up partway on her cot in the cave and striving to see through the blackness, Kai-lid could smell something large and warm-blooded moving near her, sensing but not touching her. The being was magical, but incompletely so. Kai-lid moved her lips to begin a light spell, but the voice sounded first. “Shirak.”

  Silver light streamed over Kai-lid and over the tall creature whose head brushed against the ceiling of the cave. The spell-caster gasped.

  It was a unicorn.

  White light bathed the platinum hide of the imposing creature. The unicorn was tall, its muscles well defined, its intelligent eyes the liquid blue-white of ice. But the voice was gentle. “Hello, my Dreena.” That whispering sibilance. Surely Kai-lid had heard it before.

  “Mama?” The question came in the quavering voice of the five-year-old Dreena ten Valdane, not the husky tones of the grown-up who’d fled from her father and renamed herself Kai-lid.

  Kai-lid/Dreena remembered fleetingly the sad woman who had reared her through infancy, then disappeared—died after giving birth to a stillborn baby brother, her father’s aides had said. For a long time before her death, that woman had cried in pain and sadness.

  Rumor had it that the Valdane had ordered his mage to ease his wife out of life with some post-pregnancy complication. The Valdane had convened a state funeral with a closed casket—which sparked more rumors. But the common folk believed Dreena’s mother had fled one night, that a fleet-footed silver horse had met her at the edge of the wood outside the castle.

  “Mama?” Kai-lid repeated now.

  The unicorn dipped its head and touched the tip of its horn to the ground before Kai-lid. “If it helps you to think of me as your mother, let it be so, Dreena.”

  “But are you?”

  The unicorn didn’t answer, and when Kai-lid asked again, the creature said simply, “We have no time. There is trouble, Dreena.”

  “I came here because my mother grew up near here,” Kai-lid persisted. “My father married here during his travels as a young man.”

  “I know. You cannot hide—here or anywhere—any longer,” the unicorn said. “Your father has fled to the Icereach. There he is amassing an army.”

  “Surely he cannot be a threat to me all the way from the Icereach,” Kai-lid protested.

  The whisper continued, almost hypnotic in its effect upon the young woman. “He and the mage have a powerful artifact.”

  Kai-lid shivered. She pulled her robe tighter around her. “Janusz believes I’m dead. He’ll never think to scry for me. Here I am safe. I don’t want to leave.”

  “I know.” The unicorn dipped her horn once more and began to back out of the cave. “But there is no time.”

  “Wait! What should I do?” Kai-lid cried.

  Instead of answering directly, the silvery creature stood in the cave’s mouth. “Remember this, Dreena. It will help you.”

  “But …”

  The unicorn began to chant:

  “The lovers three, the spell-cast maid,

  The winged one of loyal soul,

  The foul undead of Darken Wood,

  The vision seen in scrying bowl.

  Evil loosed with diamond’s flight.

  “Vengeance savored, ice-clenched heart

  Seeks its image to enthrone

  Matched by sword and fire’s heat,

  Embers born of steel and stone.

  Evil cast with jewel’s light.

  “The lovers three, the spell-cast maid,

  The tie of filial love abased,

  Foul legions turned, the blood flows free,

  Frozen deaths in snow-locked waste.

  Evil vanquished, gemstones might.”

  As the last line resonated in the night air, the light around the unicorn began to fade. The creature pivoted toward Darken Wood. “Wait!” Kai-lid called again, lunging from her cot and racing barefoot over the stone floor. When she reached the opening, the unicorn was gone.

  The night was silent. Kai-lid heard no stamp of hooves, saw no gray shadow slip into the woods. A mist enveloped the scene.

  Then suddenly she was back in her cot, her blanket on the floor, and she was shivering in the predawn chill.

  * * * * *

  “It was a dream,” Xanthar insisted moments later, when she’d finished relating what had happened.

  “No,” she insisted. “It was real.”

  They were in their favorite spot for talking—two branches, one above the other, jutting out of a dead sycamore. “If you flew very high,” Kai-lid said sullenly, “you might still spot her. But you’re too stubborn.”

  “Legend says that if a unicorn wants to be seen, it will be. If not, no amount of searching or wishing will help. Anyway, I’ve never heard of a unicorn venturing out of Darken Wood.”

  “My cave is very close to the woods.” Her voice rose. “You’re so obstinate. It was my mother, I tell you.”

  Xanthar fluffed his feathers and shifted on his perch. “Since when is your mother a unicorn? Anyway, you told me your mother is dead.”

  “When I was little, she told me she came from north of Haven. That could mean Darken Wood.”

  The owl snorted and muttered, “Hardly,” but Kai-lid went on, carried away by her story.

  “I used to think she was a unicorn in human form, that she fell in love with my father and married him and went away to Kern with him. When life grew unbearable, she resumed her unicorn form and returned home. I never told anybody. But she would know what is in my heart.”

  “It’s romantic nonsense, Kai-lid, a dream born of eating something you shouldn’t have in Haven yesterday.”

  “I saw my mother.”

 
The discussion circled on itself until both owl and mage grew weary. Each sat wordless, stubbornly silent at first and then merely lost in thought. Finally, as the sky was growing light in the east, Xanthar spoke again as though no time had passed. “And you believe it, that your father will attack from the south?”

  Kai-lid hesitated. Then she nodded. The owl nodded, too. “Then we must act,” he said softly.

  “We?” she asked, sitting up. Her hood fell back. “You can’t go far from Darken Wood. You’ll lose your magic.”

  “We don’t know that for a certainty. The rules of Darken Wood may vary. They say that travelers who enter much of Darken Wood find their weapons have disappeared—but not here. They say ghosts prevent travelers from entering—but not here. I may be able to go farther away than we have thought.”

  “You’ve said …”

  “We must stop the Valdane.”

  “We’re safe here.”

  The giant owl was silent for a time. Then he said, “No one is safe anywhere.” Kai-lid remembered Xanthar’s dead mate and nestlings.

  “You are his daughter. You can’t hide from him if he is determined to find you.”

  Kai-lid turned her back on the owl. Her voice was tight. “He forced me into a marriage I didn’t want, hoping to gain control of the Meir’s kingdom. Then, when the Meir and I fell in love and barred him from our land, he attacked. He killed my husband. Should I forgive that?”

  “I’m not telling you to forgive anything. I’m telling you that you have to stop him. You alone may be able to.”

  Kai-lid slid from her branch to a lower one, then to the ground. She glared up at the owl. “I won’t do it.”

  “You escaped because your lady’s maid went back, you said.”

  Kai-lid’s face went white. “Stop it.”

  But Xanthar continued. “Lida went back,” he said. “You told me this yourself, Kai-lid. Lida went back; she dressed in your clothes, realizing your father would destroy the castle, and knowing that only if they found a body they believed to be Dreena ten Valdane’s would they stop from coming after you.”

  The owl’s voice was relentless. Kai-lid put her hands over her ears. The bird switched to mind-speak.

  She was your friend. You grew up together; her mother reared you both. And she died for you. Whether you are Dreena ten Valdane or Kai-lid Entenaka, can you be selfish now?

  The spell-caster began to cry.

  Recall that morning, Kai-lid. Recall it, Dreena.

  Against her will, the spell-caster remembered fleeing the castle with Lida. The servingwoman balked halfway down the escape tunnel, saying she had to go back for something and asking if Dreena wanted to leave her wedding pendant with the Meir in his coffin as a final gesture of love.

  Memories from that hasty predawn exchange still haunted Kai-lid. Lida’s shadowed face, resolution and fright alternating in her features. The damp of the stones that walled the corridor. The musty smell of the earthen floor. The sound of water dripping. And over it all, the booming of the enemy’s drums, mimicking Dreena’s heart. She’d removed the pendant, kissed the broad green stone, and placed it in Lida’s hand. She half-guessed what her faithful friend had in mind, but she made no protest. Dreena told Lida to meet her in a cave beneath a copse of trees west of the castle. Then the servingwoman threw her arms around Dreena, kissed her, and whispered “My sister” before hurrying back through the corridor.

  How many others will you let die to keep you safe, Dreena?

  Kai-lid cried out, ran back into the cave, hid in the shadows, and sobbed. Finally, rustling and the scraping of clawed feet on stone told her Xanthar was just outside. His mind-speak was gentler.

  I believe this dream you had, Kai-lid. But I believe it is a sign that only you can stop your father. He paused. When Kai-lid didn’t answer, he added, I will go with you.

  “You can’t,” Kai-lid whispered.

  I won’t let you go alone.

  “And someone else will die for me, Xanthar?” she demanded bitterly.

  I am sorry. I should not have said that. People make their own choices. Lida chose to stay at the castle. I choose to leave here with you. A hint of humor found its way into the owl’s mind-speak. I should add that I also choose to come back here, hale and hearty, to continue to inflict my curmudgeonly presence on my grandnestlings.

  Kai-lid sat on her cot until her shivering stopped. She drew on her sandals, then rose and closed the curtain to the cave, shutting out the owl.

  What are you doing? Xanthar asked.

  “I have an idea.”

  She sensed the owl’s question and replied before it quivered in her head. “The mercenaries. Perhaps I can persuade them to go with me. They’re trained.”

  The owl hesitated before speaking. It is a thought. You can find them by scrying?

  “Perhaps. I’ll need quiet, Xanthar.”

  She felt rather than heard the bird’s assent. A shadow fell across the curtain as Xanthar took up the guard there.

  The bowl that the spell-caster reached for looked like an ordinary tureen on the outside—maple wood, polished until it gleamed. But the inside glittered with hammered gold. At the very center, another mark broke up the pattern of the hammering—the image of an edelweiss plant etched in the metal.

  Now she leaned over, retrieved a purple silk shawl from a leather bag beneath the table, and pulled a cloisonné pitcher from a niche in the stone cave wall. The fluid that Kai-lid poured from it appeared to be ordinary water, but the liquid came from a nearby stream, a tributary that entered the White-rage River west of Haven. “A stream born at the periphery of Darken Wood itself,” Kai-lid murmured reverently.

  She poured water into the tureen and watched the edelweiss motif waver, then return to sharpness when the water stilled. “With stillness comes clarity,” she intoned, ritual words that Janusz himself had taught her years ago. She motioned in the air with slender fingers and draped the shawl, the color of red grapes, over her head and the bowl. Her thumbs held down the edges of the shawl; her fingers continued to twitch as she wove the spell. She closed her eyes, concentrating.

  “Klarwalder kerben. Annwalder kerben,” she murmured. “Katyroze warn, Emlryroze sersen. Reveal, reveal.”

  She opened her eyes, waiting. At first nothing happened. Then the water dimmed and stirred and changed, as if reflecting a bank of storm clouds; the same gray-blue shone in her eyes. She released the shawl; the sides collapsed around her head but formed a tent over the bowl. Her left hand retrieved from her pocket the tortoiseshell button she’d found in the doorway in Haven. “I seek the owner of this artifact,” she whispered. “Wilcrag-meddow, jonthinandru. Reveal.”

  At the command, the water in the bowl cleared, showing no evidence of the golden edelweiss beneath its surface. It depicted a woodland scene. Kai-lid suppressed a cry of joy. There was the half-elf, leading a chestnut gelding through the early-morning grayness, and behind him, Kitiara Uth Matar and the other mercenary on black horses. A yawning lad trailed, gnawing at a large roll. The small band was deep in conversation, although her scrying spell allowed Kai-lid only to see, not to overhear. She could see a frown crease the half-elf’s face as he pushed plants aside, poked at the soil, and, balanced on his haunches, elbows resting on his bent knees, hands dangling between, scrutinized the ground.

  Kai-lid watched for some time, hoping to tell from the group’s surroundings exactly where they were. Not Darken Wood, of course, but definitely some temperate woodland. She saw maples, oaks, sycamores, and pines, and an undergrowth of maple saplings. Thick, low shrubbery told Kai-lid the travelers were near the edge of a forest, where sunlight had more of a chance of nourishing the plants near the ground.

  Suddenly she saw the half-elf stiffen and lean over, his gaze fixed on something on the ground. His whole attitude changed from watchfulness to action. He moved from the trail to a place just off to the right. He poked at something on the ground—a footprint?—while the two other mercenaries waited on their hors
es and the squire chewed and swallowed. Then the half-elf pointed to his right, virtually in the opposite direction, back the way they’d come. The mercenaries sat up in their saddles, impatience apparent in their stance as the half-elf returned to his horse. The group wheeled around.

  “They’re following something,” Kai-lid said. She watched a few moments longer, then nodded. “Mortmegh, mortrhyan, merhet. End it.”

  The water once more was water, the bowl just a bowl; the edelweiss shone as before at the bottom. She pushed the purple shawl back and felt its folds at the back of her neck. Kai-lid rested her temples on suddenly weak hands. Her black hair slipped forward like silk, and elation vied with weariness. Xanthar remained silent at the cave’s opening. He must know from the sounds that she had finished, but he also knew that scrying always exhausted her.

  Finally she lifted her head from her arms and moved to open the curtain. A pair of worried orange eyes peered at her. “I found them,” she said quietly.

  “I’ve been thinking. Perhaps we should let this be,” the owl interjected. He whetted his beak twice against the granite of the cave mouth. “After all, it was only a dream.”

  “It was real,” Kai-lid began anew. “I saw the two mercenaries, the half-elf, and a boy. They’re tracking something.”

  “Where?”

  Kai-lid shrugged. “Near Haven, I’d guess. But north, south? … I’ll have to watch them, look for landmarks.” She was silent for a time, frowning. Then she spoke again, more tentatively now. “Do you think I can … persuade the four of them to take on such a quest?”

  The owl cocked his head. “They are mercenaries, after all. You have no money. What can you offer them?”

  “I don’t know … yet.” Kai-lid leaned against the doorway and gazed around the clearing—her clearing. For a few short months, it had afforded her a safety she hadn’t known before. Now she must leave it.

  “They may recognize me,” she mused.

  “As Dreena? You are disguised.”

  “No, not as Dreena. When I realized what Lida had done, I took on most of her appearance to … to honor her memory and to leave Dreena behind forever. They may recognize Lida.”