The Druid Queen tdt-3

by Douglas Niles

  "We'll cut a line to the northeast," the dwarf explained. "That should put us nearly parallel to their advance, but gradually drawing closer to the coast. I hope they won't know we're here, but we'll have to take precautions."

  "I'll ride on the point," Brigit offered. "That should give you fair warning. If I'm spotted, they still won't know there's a company of dwarves in the woods."

  "Makes sense," agreed Finellen.

  "It's too dangerous," Hanrald objected. "At least let me ride with you!"

  Brigit glared at him, her almond eyes flashing. "I don't need you to tell me what's 'too dangerous'! And the chance of us both being spotted is far greater than I alone. After all, my mare has been raised as a woods runner."

  Hanrald bit back a blunt reply. He knew that the proud sister knight was right. She'd been waging war, riding on campaign, for years before his birth. Yet a protective part of his nature worried about the thought of allowing her to ride into such danger.

  "Besides," Finellen added, her tone surprisingly soft as she addressed Hanrald, "you're the only other rider among us. I was hoping you'd take the outrider position on our left flank. Just to make sure they don't try to get around us … you understand?"

  "You're right," agreed the Earl of Fairheight. Indeed, he and Brigit had the only two horses in the whole force. What had he been thinking, to waste that speed and mobility by trailing along with Brigit? "But I still don't see how you intend to catch them when they can make such good time."

  "Simple," replied Finellen with a casual shrug. "We'll just have to march all night."

  A growing sense of urgency propelled the High King of Moonshae. Shallot thundered along at an easy lope, his broad hooves pounding the soft earth in steady cadence. Tristan and Newt had emerged from Myrloch Vale sometime during the previous day, and now they rode through Winterglen at a steady, mile-crunching pace.

  "How come we can't stop and look around a little bit?" pouted the faerie dragon, still perched on the high pommel before the king. "I know there's waterfalls on the Codsrun, and some of them have great trout pools, too. Don't you like to eat anymore?"

  "It's a good thing I don't like it as much as you remember," Tristan retorted cheerfully. "You've put a pretty good dent in my rations!"

  "Oh, posh! Though that cheese is every bit as good as I used to think it was. Say, do you think there's another little bit you could do without?"

  "Not now! I told you, I'm not opening up these saddlebags until we stop for the night!"

  Their course took them very near Codsrun Creek. Since his meeting with the faerie dragon, Tristan's concentration had remained uninterrupted and intense. Yet as the hours and then the days had passed, he grew increasingly perplexed by the confusion which had overtaken him.

  Coupled with this mystery were the facts that he still didn't know: How many days had he been riding? How far off his track had he ventured? And what had caused his disturbing lapse in reason?

  Always as he rode, he scanned the surrounding brush, studied each neighboring hilltop and tor, searching for sign of a gray body. But the wolves had disappeared, as far as he could tell, from all the world. At night, he listened carefully, but no more did their song rise to the stars.

  "Hey! What's that?" wondered the spritely dragon, raising his narrow snout to sniff the air. "I smell a swamp!"

  In another moment, Shallot's gait faltered, and Tristan saw that the ground before them grew tangled and thick with vines, enclosing brambles, and dense, thorny underbrush. The war-horse slowed to a walk, then finally halted altogether, unable to proceed through the thicket.

  "It is a swamp!" declared Newt, rather unnecessarily. The air had become fetid and dank. Flies rose around them, buzzing through the humid air, coming to rest on human and horse alike.

  For a moment, Tristan was puzzled. He'd had a mental picture of the Codsrun flowing all the way to the sea, and now the stream itself slowed to a brackish backwater, meandering among reeds and lilies, apparently stopping in its bed. But then he remembered: He'd sailed through the Strait of Oman many times and had never seen the mouth of that splashing stream. He did remember a stretch of marsh, however-a dank fen, actually-that covered much of the shoreline near Codscove. The stream, he deduced, must spread out and form the marsh.

  But was the fen to the west or the east of that coastal town? This was the crucial fact now, and the king wasn't at all sure of the answer. Still, a sense of motivation propelled him, and he didn't want to allow this terrain to slow him down.

  Which way was it? He tried to remember, all but gritting his teeth from the force of his cogitation. Finally the best he could do was to guess, his mind teased by a variety of memories, none of them certain enough to give him any degree of confidence.

  "We'll go east," he announced, his voice more firm than his mind. "In another day, we'll get to Codscove."

  "What do you want to go there for?" Newt whined. "It's a town, isn't, it? There's just a bunch of people there. No meadows or trees or fun stuff like that."

  "A fishing town," Tristan said calmly, knowing that, besides cheese, the bounty of the seas and streams was Newt's favorite repast. "Why, I wouldn't be surprised if there were whole racks of cod and salmon drying in the sun … outdoors, where everyone can see them."

  "Say, that's right, isn't it?" Newt agreed, perking up. "You don't suppose they'd mind if one or two-No, of course they wouldn't! I don't eat that much! How long did you say it would take to get there?"

  Tristan chuckled silently, suspecting that the faerie dragon, if he was truly hungry, would pose a serious threat to the season's catch. The inducement worked well, however, as Newt clambered up on the pommel, eagerly looking around Shallot's broad head, tiny nostrils quivering for any advance warning of the destination.

  They rode easily, skirting the fringe of the swampland and passing along the same type of open forest that had surrounded them for so much of the ride through the vale and Winterglen. A light breeze wafted through the woods, and the scents of flowers and ferns filled the air, overpowering any lingering stench of the swamp.

  In the end, Tristan's estimate proved remarkably accurate, a fact which he found considerably reassuring. They passed several small farmsteads on the very fringe of the marshlands, all of them abandoned-at least, no one responded when the king rode Shallot up to the porch and called out a greeting.

  These were rude dwellings, for the most part, the shacks of hunters and trappers or the small cottages of poor homesteaders. None of the places showed any sign of damage, but the absence of the residents was eerie and disturbing.

  The king and the faerie dragon finally reached a larger house, several spacious rooms encircled by well-built wooden walls. A neat barn stood nearby, and Tristan heard the sounds of lowing cattle. The beasts sounded hungry, but not desperately so. Several lush grainfields and pastures were visible among the stands of oak and maple.

  Here Tristan dismounted and climbed the steps, knocking heavily against the door. He was astounded when the portal swung easily open beneath his fist.

  "Hello! Is anyone here?" he shouted. No answer reached his ears.

  "Let's get going!" Newt urged, curled up in the saddle now that the king had left it vacant. "I'm hungry for fish."

  "Why don't you throw those cows some hay while I go look around?" the king suggested. "It sounds like they're as hungry as you are."

  "I'm not hungry for hay!" Newt protested. Nevertheless, after he listened to the bellowing for a moment, he popped into the air and flew off toward the barn.

  Finally, still hearing nothing from within the house, the High King stepped through the door and looked around a simple but comfortably furnished room. A stone fireplace occupied most of one wall, with a pair of wooden benches facing away from the hearth-a summer rearrangement, no doubt. But what most intrigued him was the table.

  He saw dirty plates scattered among half-full goblets and hastily scattered eating knives. One plate had fallen to the floor and shattered, the pieces le
ft where they lay in the family's haste to depart. Crossing to the cookstove, he placed his hand carefully against the burners. Cold.

  Feeling a growing sense of urgency, Tristan stalked from the house, taking only the time to latch the door behind him.

  "Newt!" he called. "Let's go!" Looking toward the barn, the king saw a number of brown shapes lumbering eagerly into a pasture.

  "The hay was too heavy," Newt explained, "so I let them into the grass instead."

  "Good idea." Tristan praised him sincerely. "It doesn't look like these folks are going to be back anytime soon." In fact, the hastily abandoned house had sent a real jolt of alarm through him. For the first time, the fact became glaringly apparent-something was terribly amiss in his kingdom. His bemused reaction thus far now struck him as a shameful lapse of rulership.

  Climbing back into the saddle, he cursed the awkwardness caused by his missing hand. Quickly the High King urged Shallot into a trot, and the horse paced like an eager colt along a path through the increasingly open woodland. The hounds coursed nearby, no longer ranging through the woods. They, too, sensed their master's tension, responding protectively.

  Only Newt remained unaffected. "I don't smell any fish yet," he discoursed petulantly. "How much farther do you think it is, anyway?"

  When Tristan continued to ignore his prattle, however, even the flighty serpent began to sense that something had changed. He ceased his noisemaking and raised himself high on the pommel, sniffing the air and peering around like a watchful sentinel.

  Then they reached another farmstead, like the previous settlement except that this one was more than abandoned. It was destroyed. Grim fury took hold of Tristan as Shallot cantered past a smoking ruin that had once been a large house. Dead cattle, many cruelly gutted, lay outside what had once been a barn. That structure, like the house, was now a smoking pile of charred timbers.

  Yet the heat was not so great that it held Tristan or the dogs at bay, so he deduced that the damage had been done the previous day.

  "Go!" the king cried suddenly, kicking Shallot sharply in the ribs. Anything he could do now, he knew, he couldn't do here.

  The great war-horse sprang into a gallop, swiftly carrying the king back onto the track that had grown into a narrow forest road. The hounds flew along at the horse's heels, tongues flapping and legs pumping from the effort to keep up. Newt, after bouncing off the pommel several times, took to the air, arrowing along with his wings buzzing frantically a foot or two over Tristan's head. He was too busy flying even to talk.

  A scent came to Tristan that he well recognized-the salt air of the sea. Then forest opened away from them, breaking into scattered clumps of trees dotting a broad expanse of pasture and grainfields. Before them, they caught sight of a gleaming surface through the trees, and the High King knew that at last they approached the Strait of Oman.

  Then something closer caught his attention as the hounds flew past the horse in a frenzy of barking and snarling. The dogs leaped into a thicket lying directly beside Tristan's path, and the king immediately heard deeper, more unnatural snarls.

  In another moment, several large shapes sprang from the underbrush, sending the steady war-horse rearing backward in fright. They were already too close for his lance, so the king discarded the long shaft and grimly his sword, facing the onslaught of no less than a dozen trolls.

  The Princess of Moonshae finally approached the two enclosing peninsulas, preparing to depart Codsbay-admittedly somewhat less gracefully than she had entered. Nevertheless, Thurgol and his firbolgs had finally begun to, if not master, at least comprehend the art of propelling the sleek vessel through the water.

  Also, the giant chieftain had thought of another precaution, one that gave him a somewhat smug sense of satisfaction. Before they sailed from the harbor, he had ordered his crew of giants to paddle to each of the fishing boats floating in the placid bay. They had kicked several planks out of each hull, so by the time they reached the mouth of the bay, every ship of the tiny fleet rested on the bottom.

  With the threat of pursuit thus minimized, Thurgol concentrated on getting his villagemates to propel the longship with some modicum of control. By limiting the oarsmen to a pair on each side, the chieftain found that the giant-kin could row with a reasonable chance of striking the same cadence-at least, a good part of the time.

  Thurgol himself stood in the stern, holding the long rudder pole. At first, he had tried to help by swinging this pole back and forth, but he soon concluded that the ship progressed better if he just let the rudder trail into the water behind them. It was a lot less work that way, too.

  "Row!" he called, his bass voice rumbling across the smooth-watered bay. "Row again!" In this way, he tried to synchronize the pace of the oarsmen. Once these laboring giant-kin had learned to lift the blades out of the water on the return strokes, they actually made pretty good progress.

  As the proud longship emerged from the bay, the haze of the strait parted as if by magic. There before them, breathtaking in its majesty, sweeping above the lowlands with snow-covered peak and jagged, rocky slopes, loomed the Icepeak. Though the mist still cloaked the bulk of Oman's Isle, the mountain summit itself stood out in clear relief, outlined by the late afternoon sun into patches of shadow and stupendous, rose-tinted light.

  "It seems so close," Garisa said. The old shaman sat upon the stern platform, resting her weary bones, the Silverhaft Axe across her lap. Now that they had seized a ship and embarked onto the water, the withered hag felt a sense of profound wonder.

  "Won't get there before dark, though," Thurgol mused, with a rough approximation of their speed thus far. "Row… row again!" he shouted as a pair of oarsmen clanked their bladed shafts together.

  "But we'll get there," the shaman declared, her tone soft with amazement.

  "Didn't you know that?" Thurgol asked, surprised. After all, this had been her idea.

  "There was a time when I wasn't so sure," Garisa admitted. Of course, she well remembered her incantation in Cambro, designed to draw the band out of that dwarven stronghold before disaster struck. At the time, she hadn't really considered the goal of the Icepeak an attainable one, practically speaking, but now good fortune, perhaps even the will of the gods, had set her misgivings aside.

  "Baatlrap won't be happy," the chieftain remarked with a deep chuckle. Then he shook his head in regret. "Still, I only wish he'd stay dead. When we get back, he'll be trouble."

  Garisa looked intently at the sturdy firbolg who was the chieftain of her lifelong village. He still seemed a callow youth in some ways, but she had to admit that his leadership had been steady and forthright in bringing them this far. She honestly liked Thurgol-liked him enough that she couldn't bring herself to tell him that she didn't think they'd ever be going home again.

  That feeling had been growing steadily in her mind, solidifying, it seemed, with each night's sleep, each day's progress in their march to the north. It wasn't a feeling that she sought or desired. More to the point, as they had left Myrloch Vale behind, she had been possessed by a sense of melancholy, as if a powerful voice within told her that she looked on the trees and blossoms of that favored place for the last time.

  Now, as the coastline of Gwynneth itself fell away, as she took the first waterborne voyage of her life, Garisa couldn't suppress this wistful conclusion. Of course, if she was right, that meant that Baatlrap wouldn't be a problem for them at any time in the foreseeable future, and that was a fact she could welcome with something like genuine enthusiasm.

  "Trolls are no good for us anyway. More trouble than they're worth," she observed. "They make the humans too mad. You wait. Soon comes an army to chase them down."

  "What army?" growled Thurgol, looking at the shore behind them. He had begun to assume that his force was the greatest army in the Moonshaes, but Garisa's reminder made him remember that was not the case.

  "King's army, probably. Maybe dwarves. Who knows?" Garisa said with a shrug.

  "Northmen, too,"
observed Thurgol. For the first time, he wondered about the odd chance that had brought the crew of this vessel to the aid of Codscove. Twenty years earlier, the firbolgs had allied themselves with the long-haired raiders of the sea, both groups waging war against the Ffolk. Yet here were the sons of those same men, sailing up to a battle and joining in on the side of their former enemies against their allies of that same campaign!

  "Northmen come after us," Garisa suggested. "We got their ship. They won't like it."

  "Yup," Thurgol agreed.

  He wondered what kinds of men-what nature of enemy-they would find upon Oman's Isle. Looking forward, he saw that the sunset now cloaked the Icepeak in a mantle of rich purple light, while the lands below it and the sea around them had all fallen into shadow.

  The moving scene seemed heavy with promise, certainly magical in its potential. The picture lingered before his eyes for almost another hour, until the last rays of sunlight vanished from the world, and the outline of the Icepeak was silhouetted only by the stars.

  Once more Robyn stood atop the high tower of Corwell, watching the stars break into the clear night sky. She longed to take wing, to fly across the isle and find her husband. His strange quest had unsettled her more with each passing day, until she could hardly stand to think about it.

  Yet she had to content herself with the knowledge that Alicia and Keane rode on the king's trail, and the hope that they would reach him in time for… in time for what?

  In time to save his life. A flicker of guilt rose within her as she realized that Tristan's life did loom as the most important thing. Her husband, her daughters, the people, and the cantrevs-these were the true joys of life. All of them, but most strongly her own family, formed for the queen the boundaries of her life, the factors that caused her joy and gave her purpose.