A Sorcerer and a Gentleman

by Elizabeth Willey

  “Treachery,” Grumond growled at the stove.

  “You’ve got too much fuel in there,” Josquin said, “that’s why it isn’t taking. Pull half of it out or two-thirds.”

  Grumond did that and added more tinder and a lit twig.

  “If he’s escaped,” Grumond said, “our troubles shall soon begin again.”

  “Yes. The Prince Marshal commands us to be ready to move in an hour.”

  “You had us hold ready anyway. Good thinking, m’lord.”

  “It shan’t be over until Prospero’s head bounces twice. So the Emperor has said. I shall be glad of it; this has become rather a bore, and I never liked him terribly anyway.”

  Freia moved a little, agitated; Dewar squeezed her against him.

  Grumond’s fire was catching. He held his hands to its bright light eagerly.

  “Now close the stove,” Josquin said, “and it’ll be hotter.”

  “Lall’s a wonder with this thing. Catches right off for him. Damned inconvenient climate, m’lord.”

  Josquin laughed. “For any number of things.”

  “Golias is going to be itchy now,” chuckled Grumond, standing and closing the door of the stove.

  “Where is Lall?”

  “Chasing some wench. I gave him the dinner hour free. Believe he went off with Panzo, you know Panzo.”

  Josquin chuckled too. “Call on me later, when he’s back to keep your stove going.”

  “Thank you, m’lord. I shall. Cards?”

  “Naturally,” Josquin said, and went out.

  “We may not do much better than this,” Dewar murmured. “I can look in on Golias next.” Freia sipped tea and passed the cup to him. It was hot; welcome in his cold throat.

  Freia asked, “He’s the mercenary …?”

  “Yes. Later, if Golias is unhelpful, we can watch Josquin play cards. He’s always been an obliging gossipy fellow.” He broke the spell that bound Josquin and cast another for Golias, using the pipe. Since Dewar was the last to handle the pipe, it was more difficult to fix on Golias, but finally Dewar wrested the line of the spell’s seeking away from himself and found the mercenary.

  Freia gasped. “No!” she cried.

  Dewar held her down. “Calm down and listen!”

  A lean blond man stood in front of Golias, held by two of Golias’s mercenaries. Around each of his eyes was a line of fresh-welling blood, seeping like tears on his cheeks. Blood ran down his neck, too, from his right ear. Golias was sitting down.

  “Stake him out again,” he said.

  Freia’s hands were cutting off the circulation in Dewar’s forearm.

  “So you know him,” Dewar said, as the man was hauled out of Golias’s presence.

  Golias, scowling, filled a pipe and opened a bottle of wine.

  “He’s my fa—he’s second to Prospero here. Utrachet.”

  “Then we’ve likely found the troops,” Dewar said, “and doubtless Golias, in his own subtle way, was trying to find out what we want to know, or something similar.”

  Freia began to say something, and stopped. Dewar politely pried her fingers loose.

  She quavered, “Sorry. I—”

  “A shock,” he said, and stroked her cold hands. “Now let’s see if we can find out more from the captain here.”

  “He must be an—an ogre. To hurt him …”

  “He is.” Dewar drew the spell in closer.

  Golias looked around suspiciously and paused in mid-drink. He set down the glass and waited, still tense, and then opened a brown book in front of him. A journal. Dewar recklessly narrowed the spell’s focus so that Golias’s penwork was visible and leaned forward to read it.

  Perendlac. Day VI here. Questioned P’s captain again, no answers. XII more hanged, of the strongest.

  “What does it say?” Freia demanded, unable to see around Dewar.

  “Uh, he’s writing his journal,” Dewar said, thinking quickly, “about how Utrachet isn’t talking. He doesn’t seem to know his name.”

  “Utrachet would say nothing,” Freia said, “not even that, and the men speak none of the language here—” She stopped and blinked.

  Word comes that Otto let P slip away again. Dewar did the groundwork for the escape, getting in, killing two guards, disrupting the Bounds, and knocking a hole in the damn tower wall. Told Otto to put the prisoner in the dungeons, he insisted on the tower. The fool, to have cast all away. An ill day. The Marshal and Herne wait in Landuc for word of Prospero’s whereabouts. On full alert.

  Dewar translated this.

  “But where are they?”

  “Perendlac. Perendlac. Hm. I’ll need a map. It’s somewhere in the river-plains. Perendlac’s a famous fortress.”

  Golias sanded the page, dried it, and closed the book. He looked around him, scowling again, and got up and took his cloak, leaving the tent quickly without a light. The connection faded and failed. Dewar broke the spell.

  “Perendlac,” he said again.

  “We have to get them out,” Freia said.

  “Prospero is probably planning to get them out himself,” Dewar said. “We have to be there when he does it.”

  “He’s hurting Utrachet! How far away is it?”

  “It’s a good distance,” Dewar admitted. The Road or a Ley might pass nearby. He gave the cup back to her and she refilled it.

  “Trixie is fast,” Freia said.

  Dewar’s arm was still around her. She turned, kneeling and looking into his eyes.

  “We have to go there, to Perendlac,” she insisted. “We can’t leave them there! Prospero might be too late.”

  “I’m trying to think how, madame.”

  “You don’t know where it is?” she asked.

  “I do, but not in such particulars as would enable us to navigate there from here. I am thinking that, since Trixie can fly there, I can cast a spell to lead us to Golias and that may do as well as or better than a map.”

  “But—”

  “Of course we do not go to Golias. We stop before then, having seen with our eyes the evidence of his and his army’s presence before us.”

  “Ohhh. I see. Like following a scent.”

  He nodded and smiled.

  “How long will it take to cast this spell? How far away is it?”

  “It is hundreds of miles,” he said. “This is no over-the-hills jaunt. Moreover we must avoid being seen.”

  Freia, agitated, began, “If you had a map—”

  He put two fingers on her mouth, silencing her. “Let me think. It might be best to travel by night. Trixie is not inconspicuous. I must do some preparatory sorcery.”

  “How long?”

  “A couple of hours. You can sleep while I do what I must.”

  After a long, searching look in his firelit face, Freia nodded. “All right,” she said.

  “I warn you I’m going to be very hungry when I finish, so I’ll have to eat a big meal.”

  “There are apples in my saddlebag. Have some now.”

  He bowed his head politely. “Thank you. I’ll still need to eat afterward. It’s a drain.”

  “I know.” Freia nodded, sighing, and sat back on her heels.

  “You’re worried about your friends,” Dewar said, leaning forward and squeezing her shoulder. “We’ll go as quickly as we can. I am as interested in seeing Prospero as you are. He may be there by the time we are.”

  “Trixie flies very fast,” Freia said.

  “For how long?”

  She bit her lip. “I’ve only ridden her a long time alone. Nearly a whole day once, with a lot of soaring. This will be more work. We might push her for half the night, or a bit less.”

  “That might do it, if the winds are favorable. Now sleep. You’ll have to be awake to fly.”

  “You don’t want me to watch.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Say so then.”

  “I don’t want you watching me work.”

  Freia nodded. “Trixie, guard,” she said to th
e gryphon, putting her hand on Dewar’s head.

  The gryphon’s eyes, which had been closed, opened and fixed her lambent look on the sorcerer.

  He said, “You don’t trust me.”

  “No,” Freia stated.

  They studied one another. Dewar’s mouth quirked. “Sweet dreams, lady,” he said. “I’ll wake you.”

  Freia retreated to the hay with her two blankets and watched him for a quarter of an hour or so. Gradually, she relaxed, and when Dewar heard her breathing deepen and slow, he began arranging his spell.

  Trixie wouldn’t let him leave the hut. She rose and blocked him, the wicked beak half-open, ready to snap. This he found irritating, and he woke Freia before he had intended to in order to gain his freedom.

  “Hm?” she said, blinking at the golden light of his ignis fatuus, conjured to eke out the firewood.

  “Mind calling off your watcher so I can step outside for a few minutes?”

  “What?”

  “I need to piss and the gryphon is keeping me in,” Dewar repeated.

  “Oh. Trix, easy.”

  “Thank you, madame.”

  Freia lay back down and was asleep when he returned after a cold and starry-skied sortie around the back of the lean-to. The gryphon, which had not moved her eyes from him while he had built the spell to draw them to Golias through his pipe, had tucked her head under a wing. He hoped the animal was rested enough.

  “Freia, wake up.”

  “Mm.”

  He shook her shoulder. “Come now. Wake up.”

  “Ah-hah,” she said, but didn’t move.

  “If you don’t get up, I’ll rouse you, like it or not,” he threatened.

  “Just try,” Freia grumbled, blinking at him. “What’s that?”

  “An ignis. Here, drink this, it’s hot.” He pushed tea at her. A slow starter, clearly; Dewar was rarely sluggish on waking and was growing impatient to be gone. “We’re in a hurry, remember?”

  “Oh. Yes. I forgot.”

  “Wonderful,” he said, and began packing her pot away.

  Freia rubbed her eyes, drank the acidic tea, sat picking hay out of her clothes for a minute or so, and then, with a quick “Excuse me,” bolted outside.

  Dewar grinned and picked up the cup and her blankets. He’d been sure the tea would get her out of the hay.

  “Sweet stars, it’s cold,” she said presently from the other side of the gryphon. “Come along, Trixie. Oh, thanks for rolling that up.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Freia, nodding, was tying the blankets and her saddlebags on. “Stretch first,” she advised Dewar, doing so, joints snapping and creaking. “Ready?”

  “For half an hour now, madame.”

  She glared at him in the ignis’s mellow light. “Now what? What about this spell business?”

  “We mount and fly. The heading is that way.” He pointed west-northwest.

  Freia looked in that direction, picking out stars, he realized. “Good,” she said, and climbed onto the gryphon. Dewar got up behind her, dismissing the ignis with a finger-snap. Trixie protested with a muffled squawk and Freia had to talk to her, encouraging her. Finally the gryphon trotted in her uneven way to an outcrop of stone.

  “Ready,” Freia said to Dewar.

  “Ready.” He tightened his arms around her waist. He was pressed against her back, his cloak tucked in tightly around him, knees drawn up under hers in the advised position.

  Freia reached down and pulled at his left knee. “You can put your legs around—right, like that; it might work better. Go, Trixie!”

  Trixie went, a jump, a plunge; wings catching thin air and making it solid.

  Dewar watched this time as the ground fell from them under the gryphon’s straining body.

  “This is fabulous,” he murmured. He wanted a gryphon. He’d have to butter her up, find out how and where to get one.

  They left the mountains in less than an hour.

  “The Plain of Linors, this is,” Dewar told his pilot.

  “Linors?”

  “Yes. Lys is here, and Sarsemar and Yln in the south.” He thought of warm, long-limbed Luneté and smiled, his cheek pressed to Freia’s neck. Ah, that had been fun. Luneté was clumsy still, a virgin until marrying Otto and no time to practice since, but her shyness had made its own kind of excitement. And here he was, far above her lands, flying in the starry night.

  “Good that the weather’s clear,” Freia said. “Can’t fly in snow and rain.”

  Dewar nodded. The gryphon’s wings stroked the air. The stars and the night rushed past.

  “Dewar—”

  “Right here.”

  “Sauce.”

  Impudently, he kissed her cheek. “Fresh too,” he said. “I’m numb, madame, with wind and cramp: as cold as a butcher’s slab.”

  Freia laughed. “Me too,” she said, “and Trixie is tired, I can feel it. We’ll have to set down.”

  “And dawn comes soon. Hm.”

  He looked down at the ground, a patchwork of fields and pastures.

  “I want your opinion on safe stopping-spots,” Freia said. “You know more than I do about the way people set up their farms hereabouts.”

  Dewar didn’t think he did, but he nodded and began paying attention to the ground, which he had ignored for the stars and for occasional murmured course corrections to Freia. The pipe, buttoned inside his doublet in a pouch, tugged gently toward Golias: west-northwest.

  After a few minutes, he said, “There’s a wooded area coming up.”

  “Trees. Can’t land in trees.”

  “Is she able to get across it?”

  “Yes. There’s a river up beyond—”

  “Ah. We’re closer than I thought. It may be the Rendlac. Look, they have haystacks here too; they’re civilized. And snow. Aim for one of those big boxy structures.”

  “You’re sure. Once we’re down, we’re down.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Hold on.” She leaned forward, commanding Trixie to descend; the plummet began, paused, began, paused—

  Dewar closed his eyes as the ground lurched and rushed erratically.

  The landing was easier than before. Trixie fell on something that squalled.

  “Hell!”

  “Shsh! It’s a goat or something. She’s hungry. Get down.”

  It was some consolation to him to see that Freia was as stiff and uncomfortable as he. They wobbled around getting circulation back while Trixie began ripping up the animal she had killed. Others were running away over the snow in a bleating panic.

  “I didn’t see that road,” Freia said, squinting. “Is it a road?”

  “We should be safe enough here,” Dewar assured her. “Let’s go look at the barn.”

  Followed by Trixie, who carried her kill in her beak, they stomped through the snow to the barn. It was no more than a roof thrown over a huge haystack, with hurdles around the bottom to keep the herd out.

  “It’ll do,” Freia said, and took the gryphon’s saddlebags down. Dewar got the bedroll. “That was a long one,” she added. “Good work, Trixie. You’ve earned a rest.”

  “We’re close to Perendlac, too,” Dewar said. “Can you make her get out of sight?”

  Freia guided the gryphon around to the side of the haystack away from the road.

  “She’ll be fine here.” Trixie began eating entrails with gusto. Freia wrinkled her nose and looked at Dewar. “No table manners. She’ll sleep afterward.”

  “Days are short. We can go again at dark.”

  “How close are we?”

  “I’m not sure, but I know Perendlac controls the junction of the Rendlac and Parry rivers. That river looked too wide to be anything but the Rendlac after the Parry joins it.”

  Freia nodded and set her bags and blankets down. Dewar walked aimlessly, swinging his arms and loosening up his body, and ignored her as she discreetly wandered off around the corner. There was a hedgerow nearby and the forest was a quarter-mile or so
beyond that.

  When Freia returned, Dewar said he would get them wood from the hedgerow for a fire. The field was trampled muddy. He picked his way carefully, without an ignis—no point taking the risk of being noticed. In the hedgerow he collected a large armload of wood, not difficult by the starlight, and returned with it. Trixie had gorged and now was curled up with head under wing.

  The wood was damp and recalcitrant. He finally summoned an ignis to spark it.

  Freia was quiet, watching the snow get whiter with the coming day. She cooked a mixture of grain, dried fruit, nuts, and dried meat for them to eat. They emptied her canteen, thirsty from the arid air.

  “There is a brook over that way,” Dewar said.

  “It’ll be mucked. Those dirty animals.”

  “Hm, true. Further in the wood it will be cleaner. We’ll get more water tonight.”

  Freia nodded. “And for now?”

  “We lie low.” He looked around. “Up there’s probably best. Trixie will surely let us know if anyone comes investigating.”

  With difficulty, they climbed the haystack and settled down on it. The sun was risen, red and swollen, a baleful cyclopean glare on their hiding-place.

  The tension and strain of the flight had wearied them both. They slept before the sun had changed from red to gold.

  29

  DEWAR WOKE WITH A START, UNSURE where he was, and remembered: he was on Prospero’s trail with a gryphon and her rider. At the moment he was on a haystack with the latter, around whose back he was curled. She was holding his hand loosely. Her rump was tucked against his crotch, a pleasant feeling to which he was not insensitive. The air was cold, but he was surprisingly cozy due to the doubling of their body heat.

  He smiled. She liked him, he was sure. She wasn’t unlikable herself. This could get better, even without a featherbed. They were warm here under blankets in the hay. It wasn’t windy, as in Ascolet. Wonderful animal, the gryphon—they had travelled more than three hundred miles.

  Freia sighed heavily. Her fingers pressed his and relaxed. Dewar moved his hand flat against her body—she’d removed her jacket to use it for a pillow. Her shirt was silky. She smelled of hay and female musk, complicated odors that pleased his nose.