"You have a point,” she admitted. “And yes, Lyran does have something more at stake with me than just his contract.” She was rather surprised to see the rest of the Councilors nod soberly.
Well. Well, well! They may not like it—they may think I'm some kind of fool, or worse—but they've got to admit that what Lyran and I have can be pretty useful to the Guild. “How soon do you want us to leave?"
"Are you completely recovered from—"
"Dealing with Kelven? Physically, yes. Mentally, emotionally—to be honest, only time will tell. Betrayal; gods, that's not an easy thing to deal with."
"Admitted—and we're setting you up to deal with another traitor.” Dabrel had the grace to look guilty.
"At least this one isn't one of my former favorite pupils,” she replied, grimacing crookedly, “I don't even think I know him."
"You don't,” Herjes said, “I trained him. He also is not anywhere near Kelven's potential, and he isn't dabbling in blood-magic. Speaking of which—have you recovered arcanely as well as physically?"
"I'm at full power. I can go any time."
"In the morning, then?"
"In the morning.” She inclined her head slightly; felt the faintest whisper of magic brush her by.
Show-offs, she thought, as she heard the doors behind her open. Two can play that game.
"We will be on our way at dawn, Councilors,” she said, carefully setting up the rolibera spell in her mind, and wrapping it carefully about both herself and Lyran. There weren't too many mages even at Masterclass level that could translate two people at once. She braced herself, formed the energy into a tightly coiled spring with her mind, then spoke one word as she inclined her head again—There was a flash of light behind her eyes, and a fluttery feeling in her stomach as if she had suddenly dropped the height of a man.
And she and Lyran stood side-by-side within the circle carved into the floor of her private workroom.
She turned to see the mask of indifference drop from him, and his thin, narrow face come alive with mingled humor and chiding.
"Must you always be challenging them, beloved?"
She set her mouth stubbornly. He shook his head. “Alas,” he chuckled, “I fear if you stopped, I would no longer know you. Challenge and avoidance—” He held out his arms, and she flowed into them. “Truly, beloved,” he murmured into her ear, as she pressed her cheek into the silk of his tunic shoulder, “we Balance each other."
* * * *
They would not be riding Jesalis and Tosspot, those beasts of foul temper and fiercely protective instincts. This was a mission which would depend as much on the impression they would give as their capabilities, and Tosspot and Jesalis would be unlikely to impress anyone. Instead, when they descended the tower stairs in the pale, pearly light of dawn, Martis found the grooms in the stone-paved courtyard holding the reins of two showy palfreys, a grey and a bay. Tethered behind the bay on a lead rope was a glossy mule loaded with packs. The harness of the grey was dyed a rich purple, and that of the bay was scarlet. Lyran approached the horses with care, for the eyes of the bay rolled with alarm at the sight of the stranger. He ran his hands over their legs once he could get near them, and walked slowly back to Martis’ side with his arms folded, shaking his head a little.
"Hmm?” she asked.
"Worthless,” he replied. “I hope we will not be needing to entrust our lives to them. No strength, no stamina—and worst of all, no sense."
"They're just for show,” Martis frowned, feeling a little dubious herself. “We aren't supposed to have to do any hard riding, or long, except for the gallop to take us through the Gates. A day's ride to the first Gate, half a day to the second. In and out of both Gates, then a ride of less than half a day to the city."
"If all goes well. And what if all does not go well?"
"I—” Martis fell silent. “Well, that's why you're along."
Lyran looked back over his shoulder at the horses, and grimaced. “This one will do the best one can, Mage-lady,” he said formally. “Will the Mage-lady mount?"
Martis had been doing more with Lyran's aid than her colleagues suspected. A few moons ago she would not have been able to mount unaided—now she swung into her saddle with at least some of the grace of her lover. The exercises he had been insisting she practice had improved her strength, her wind, her flexibility—she was nearly as physically fit as she'd been twenty-odd years ago, when she'd first come to the Academe.
Lyran mounted at nearly the same moment, and his bay tried to shy sideways. It jerked the reins out of the groom's hands, and danced backwards, then reared. Lyran's mouth compressed, but that was the only sign that he was disturbed that Martis could see. The scarlet silk of his breeches rippled as he clamped his legs around the bay gelding's barrel, and the reins seemed to tighten of themselves as he forced the gelding back down to the ground, and fought him to a standstill. As the horse stood, sweating, sides heaving, Lyran looked up at her.
"This one will do what this one can, Mage-lady,” he repeated soberly.
The grey palfrey Martis rode was of a more placid disposition, for which she was profoundly grateful. She signed to the groom to release his hold and turned its head to face the open wooden gate set into the stone walls of the court. At Lyran's nod she nudged it with her heels and sent it ambling out beneath the portcullis.
They rode in single file through the city, Lyran trailing the mule at a respectful distance from “his employer.” Four times the bay started and shied at inconsequential commonplaces; each time Lyran had to fight the beast back onto all four hooves and into sweating good behavior. The last time seemed to convince it that there was no unseating its rider, for it did not make another attempt. Once outside the city walls, they reversed their positions, with Lyran and the mule going first. Ordinarily Martis would now be spending her time in half-trance, gathering power from the living things around her. But her mount was not her faithful Tosspot, who could be relied upon to keep a falling-down drunk in the saddle—and Lyran's beast was all too likely to shy or dance again, and perhaps send her gelding off as well. So instead of gathering always-useful energy, she fumed and fretted, and was too annoyed even to watch the passing landscape.
* * * *
They reached the Gate at sunset. The ring of standing stones in the center of the meadow stood out black against the flaming glow of the declining sun. The wide, weed-grown fields around them were otherwise empty; not even sheep cared to graze this near a Gate. The evening wind carried a foretaste of autumnal chill as it sighed through the grasses around them. Martis squinted against the bloody light and considered their options.
Lyran had finally decided to exhaust his misbehaving mount by trotting it in circles around her as they traveled down the road until it was too tired to fuss. Now it was docile, but plainly only because it was weary. It still rolled its eyes whenever a leaf stirred. The sorceress urged her gelding up beside his.
"Can you get one last run out of him?” Martis asked anxiously.
"Probably,” Lyran replied. “Why?"
"I'd like to take this Gate now, if we can, while that misbegotten horse of yours is too tired to bolt."
He looked at her in that silent, blank-faced way he had when he was thinking. “What if he did bolt?"
"The gods only know where you'd end up,” she told him frankly. “If he got out of my influence—I can't predict what point beyond the Gate you'd come out at, or even what direction it would be in."
"And if I can't get him to a gallop?"
"Almost the same—if you didn't keep within my aura you'd come out somewhere between here and where I'd land."
He reached out and touched her face with the tips of his fingers. “You seem tired, beloved."
"I am tired,” she admitted, confessing to him what she would admit to no other living person. “But I'm not too tired to Gate-spell, and I think it's safer to do it now than it will be later."
"Then I will force this bundle of contrariness di
sguised as a horse into keeping up with you."
"Hold butter-brains here, would you?” she passed him the reins of her mount, not trusting it to stand firm on its own. She drew entirely into herself, centering all her concentration on the hoarded power within herself, drawing it gradually to the surface with unspoken words and careful mental probes. Her eyes were closed, but she could feel the energy stirring, flowing, coming up from—elsewhere—and beginning to trickle along the nerves of her spine. At first it was barely a tingle, but the power built up quickly until she was vibrating to its silent song.
At that point she opened the channels to her hands, raising her arms out in front of her and holding her hands out with the open palms facing the ring of standing stones.
The power surged along her arms and leapt for the ring of the Gate with an eagerness that was almost an emotion. She sang the words of the Gate-spell now, sang it in a barely audible whisper. Her eyes were half open, but she really wasn't paying a great deal of attention to anything but the flow of power from her to the Gate.
The ring of stones began to glow, glowing as if they were stealing the last of the sun's fire and allowing it to run upon their surfaces. The color of the fire began to lighten, turning from deep red to scarlet to a fiery orange. Then the auras surrounding each Gate-stone extended; reaching for, then touching, the auras beside it, until the circle became one pulsating ring of golden-orange light.
Martis felt the proper moment approaching, and signed to Lyran to hand her back her reins. She waited, weighing, judging—then suddenly spurred her mount into one of the gaps between the stones, with Lyran's gelding practically on top of her horse's tail.
They emerged into a forest clearing beneath a moon already high, exactly five leagues from the next Gate.
* * * *
"Gods, I wish I had Tosspot under me,” Martis muttered, facing the second Gate under a bright noontide sun. This one stood in the heart of the forest, and the stones were dwarfed by the stand of enormous pine trees that towered all about them. The sorceress was feeling depleted, and she had not been able to recuperate the energy she'd spent on the last spell.
"We could wait,” Lyran suggested. “We could rest here, and continue on in the morning."
Martis shook her head with regret. “I only wish we could. But it isn't healthy to camp near a Gate—look at the way the magic's twisted those bushes over there, the ones growing up against the stones! And besides, we need to come as close to surprising our hosts as we can."
She coughed; there was a tickle in the back of her throat that threatened to turn into a cold. Lyran noted that cough, too, and tightened his mouth in unvoiced disapproval, but made no further objections. Martis handed him her reins, and began the second spell—But they emerged, not into a sunlit clearing as she'd expected, but into the teeth of the worst storm she'd ever seen.
Rain, cold as the rains of winter, lashed at them, soaking them to the skin in moments. It would have been too dark to see, except that lightning struck so often that the road was clearly lit most of the time. Lyran spurred his horse up beside the sorceress as she gasped for breath beneath the onslaught of the icy water. He'd pulled his cloak loose from the lashings that held it to his saddle and was throwing it over her shoulders before she even had recovered the wit to think about the fact that she needed it. The cloak was sodden in seconds, but it was wool—warm enough, even though wet. She stopped shivering a little, but the shock of chill coming on top of the strain of the spells had unbalanced her a little. She fumbled after her reins, but her mind wouldn't quite work; she couldn't seem to think where they should be going.
Lyran put his hand under her chin, and turned her face toward his. She blinked at him, at his searching expression as revealed by the flickers of lightning. Some rational little bit of her that hadn't been stunned hoped idly that he remembered what she'd told him once, about how mages sometimes went into spell-shock when they were low on energy and hit with unexpected physical conditions. This happened most frequently when they were ungrounded and uncentered—and the Gate-spell demanded that she be both when taking them in transit.
Evidently he did, for he took the reins out of her unresisting fingers and nudged his gelding into a nervy, shuddering walk, leaving her to cling to the saddle as best she could while he led her mount.
It was impossible to hear or be heard over the nearly continuous roar of the thunder, so she didn't even try to speak to him. She just closed her eyes and concentrated on getting herself centered and grounded again. So it was that she never noticed when the road approached the brink of a river—once peaceful, now swollen and angry with flood water. She knew that there was such a road, and such a river—she knew that they were to cross it before reaching Lyosten. She knew that there was a narrow, aged bridge that was still nonetheless sound, but she was too deeply sunk within herself to see it, as Lyran urged the horses onto its span.
But she felt the lightning-strike, so close it scorched the wood of the bridge not ten paces in front of them.
And as her eyes snapped open, she saw Lyran's horse rearing above her in complete panic—a darkly writhing shape that reared and thrashed—and toppled over onto hers. She had no time to react; she felt herself go numb and open-mouthed in fear, and then pain as all of them, horses, humans, and mule, crashed through the railing of the bridge to plunge into the churning water below. She flailed wildly with unfocused energy trying to form up something to catch them—and lost spell and all in the shock of hitting the raging water.
* * * *
Martis pulled herself up onto the muddy bank, scraping herself across the rocks and tree-roots protruding from it, and dragging Lyran with her by the shoulder-fabric of his tunic. She collapsed, half-in, half-out of the water, too spent to go any farther. The swordsman pulled himself, coughing, up onto the bank beside her. A child of open plains, he couldn't swim.
Fortunately for both of them, Martis could. And equally fortunately, he'd had the wit to go limp when he felt her grabbing his tunic. The storm—now that the damage was done—was slackening.
"Are you all right?” she panted, turning her head and raising herself on her arms enough to be able to see him, while her teeth chattered like temple rattles.
Lyran had dragged himself up into a sitting position, and was clutching a sapling as if it were a lover. His eyes were bruised and swollen, one of them almost shut, and there was a nasty welt along the side of his face. He coughed, swallowed, nodded. “I think—yes."
"Good.” She fell back onto the bank, cheek pressed into the mud, trying to keep from coughing herself. If she did—it felt as if she might well cough her aching lungs out. She fought the cough with closed eyes, the rain plastering hair and clothing flat to her skin.
This is witched weather; the power is everywhere, wild, undisciplined. How could that Lyosten mage have let himself get so out of control? But that was just a passing thought, unimportant. The important thing was the cold, the aching weariness. She was so cold now that she had gone beyond feeling it—
"Martis—"
She was drifting, drifting away, being carried off to somewhere where there was sun and warmth. In fact, she was actually beginning to feel warm, not cold. She felt Lyran shake her shoulder, and didn't care. All she wanted to do was sleep. She'd never realized how soft mud could be.
"Martis!" It was the sharp-edged fear in his voice as much as the stinging slap he gave her that woke her. She got her eyes open with difficulty.
"What?” she asked stupidly, unable to think.
"Beloved, thena, you are afire with fever,” he said, pulling her into his arms and chafing her limbs to get the blood flowing. “I cannot heal disease, only wounds. Fight this—you must fight this, or you will surely die!"
"Ah—” she groaned, and tried to pummel the fog that clouded her mind away. But it was a battle doomed to be lost; she felt the fog take her, and drifted away again.
* * * *
Lyran half-carried, half-dragged the mage up the las
t few feet of the road to the gates of Lyosten. The horses were gone, and the mule, and with them everything except what they had carried on their persons that had not been ripped away by the flood-waters. His two swords were gone; he had only his knife, his clothing, and the money belt beneath his tunic. Martis had only her robes; no implements of magic or healing, no cloak to keep her warm—
At least she had not succumbed to shock or the cold-death; she was intermittently conscious, if not coherent. But she was ill—very ill, and like to become worse.
The last few furlongs of road had been a waking nightmare; the rain stopped as if it had been shut off, but the breeze that had sprung up had chilled them even as it had dried their clothing. Once past the thin screen of trees lining the river, there had been nothing to buffer it. It hadn't helped that Lyran could see the bulk of Lyosten looming in the distance, dark grey against a lighter grey sky. He'd forced himself and Martis into motion, but more often than not he was supporting her; sheer exhaustion made them stagger along the muddy road like a pair of drunks, getting mired to the knees in the process. It was nearly sunset when they reached the gates of the city.
He left Martis leaning against the wood of the wall and went to pound on the closed gates themselves, while she slid slowly down to crouch in a miserable huddle, fruitlessly seeking shelter from the wind.
A man-sized door opened in the greater gate, and a surly, bearded fighter blocked it.
"What's the ruckus?” he growled.
Lyran drew himself up and tried not to shiver. “This one is guard to Martis, Master Sorceress and envoy of the Mages’ Guild,” he replied, his voice hoarse, his throat rasping. “There has been an accident—"
Dragon's Teeth [Martis series 2] Page 2
