Shadow Moon

by Chris Claremont

  Then, the ceiling fell in and Ryn Taksemanyin crashed among them, in a hail of broken wood and thatch. The Wyr landed beside Simya in a crouch and, before the big man could react, scooped his legs out from under him and dropped him with force enough to shake the floor. Ryn had claws, but he preferred knives, three in each hand, held between clenched and folded fingers, and used them with wild, madcap abandon. Never to draw blood, Thorn saw that from the start; most of the wounds that followed came from one thug striking another by mistake. Their rescuer never stayed in any one place long enough to be seen, much less struck. By the time his foes reacted, the damage was done, their laces slashed, pants about their ankles, cloaks pitched over heads. Clodhoppers against quicksilver, no contest start to finish, in so dazzling a display of agility and charm that Thorn couldn’t help a smile.

  He called Khory to help with Geryn and hurried to Elora, wincing in startlement as something hot flicked the back of his neck. At first, he thought he’d run into one of his own mites, but a glance upward told him the situation was far more serious. A torch had ignited the roof, and even though the outside air was damp and thick with falling snow, the bulk of the thatch was tinder dry. It burned hot and it burned fast and Thorn knew they had precious little time before the whole building was engulfed.

  He didn’t waste time with niceties; he freed Elora from the wall, but that was all as he cast about for an exit. Ryn popped up then to point the way.

  It was only when he was well clear of the tavern that Thorn realized he and Elora were alone.

  “Khory,” he cried, and started back the way he came.

  There was no saving the place; the whole of the roof was involved, flames giving a deceptively rosy cast to the snow-carpeted roadside clearing as they worked their way into the walls. Bodies tumbled frantically from every opening, sounding cries of alarm and fright as most hurried to save themselves and only a few whatever was of value within.

  Among the latter were Khory and Geryn Havilhand, hustled out the door by their Wyr deliverer just as the lodgepole collapsed, pulling the bulk of a wall along with it.

  “Horses!” Thorn called, but had little hope of regaining them. The stables were on the far side of the tavern, with too many folk in between for a successful sally.

  “Already taken care of,” said Ryn with a smile to his voice to make up for the one the shape of his mouth couldn’t seem to manage. “Saddled, ready, and waiting. With as much of your belongings as I could find.”

  There wasn’t much point in riding, Geryn was too badly hurt, so Thorn grabbed one set of reins and motioned to Khory to take the other two. He was turning toward Elora to remove her mask when he discovered that their rescuer had beaten him to it, snapping the buckles and unthreading the laces with the uncanny dexterity of a born sneak thief.

  They were well into the trees, along a sidebar trail used mostly by woodland creatures, but still too close to the tavern for Thorn’s comfort; though, from the glow they could still make out through the mist and snow, and the harried cries echoing through the night, they didn’t have to worry much about pursuit. For the moment. That would change the minute the messenger from the tavern reached the Princess and her Maizan allies, and Thorn wanted to be long gone when they arrived.

  Elora coughed as the gag was gently pulled free, then her eyes went wide as could be as Ryn placed a hand over her lower face to silence her, a finger bisecting his own lips for emphasis. Thorn expected a tantrum, but she surprised him with a twitch at the corner of her mouth that might have been the beginnings of a legitimate smile. An expression he’d seen before, when a fairy had danced on the baby Elora’s nose.

  So, he thought, the world’s still a wonder to you, child, no matter how hard you try to deny it. Might be some hope for you yet.

  “I’m a friend,” Ryn told Elora, looking her straight in the eyes, although his words were for them all.

  “And we’re thankful for it….” Thorn replied, ending the phrase with an interrogatory uplift of tone.

  “I know you,” exclaimed Geryn, to Ryn, “from the river-boat.”

  The Wyr nodded, and answered Thorn’s unspoken query.

  “Morag put me ashore, a cove a small ways along the coast.”

  “Why?”

  “Had a dream, cast a Looker”—a prescient trance—“to see what’s what. Best we go, Drumheller.”

  “Geryn needs healing,” Thorn told him.

  “I can manage,” protested the Pathfinder, proving the point by hauling himself into his saddle. “Wizard,” he added to Thorn, “can’t yeh magic our trail?”

  Thorn shook his head. “That’ll be the first thing the Maizan’ll look for. And I’ll wager any odds their trackers are Warded so they can see past any glamours. Speed is our best hope, but we won’t make any until I make you well.”

  “If you can hold till daylight,” Ryn said, “we’ll call a halt then. At least the snowfall’s heavy enough to fill in our tracks; if they want to find us, they’ll have to look very hard.”

  “They do,” Thorn told him grimly, “and they will.”

  They made fair time. Ryn had a knack for finding the easiest, quickest pathways through the forest, but that didn’t always mean he’d follow it. If a trail was natural to him, it could be the same for any pursuit, which meant that every so often they’d follow a harder route. The best they managed was a brisk walk, fair progress considering Geryn’s condition and the comparative ignorance of the two women. Ryn led the way, while Thorn brought up the rear, senses cast wide for the first hint of anyone following. Thus far, he’d had not the slightest contact, but the strain was telling on him. Being that aware, especially while making sure not to be noticed in the process, was as wearing as any physical exertion and he was nearing the bottom of his reserves. The snow wasn’t helping. Pretty to look at, sheer hell to plow through. Even Ryn, stumpy as he looked, had longer legs to serve him.

  Along the whole of the peninsula—from Angwyn to where it broadened into the mainland proper—the ground was split lengthwise by a series of ridgelines, serrations that rose and fell from a central range of hills that defined the landscape like a spine. Depending on the formations of the slopes, the countryside alternated between forest and open meadow. The trade-off was obvious—speed for cover. Problem was, Thorn had no idea which would be the better choice.

  Ryn found them a small defile just within the tree line, where a jumbled rockfall created a fair shelter about a pool of water that turned out to be unexpectedly warm to the touch.

  “Hot spring,” he told them, which also explained the lack of snow and the richness of the vegetation in the vicinity. Regardless of the air temperature, the ground would never even grow chill, much less freeze.

  “This is new,” Thorn observed.

  “Hot springs in general,” Ryn offered with a burble in his voice to match that of the water coursing merrily through the fallen stones, “or this one in particular.”

  “Both. This was never the country for them.”

  “Land’s been lively lately. Maybe wanting to be part of Elora’s Ascension itself.”

  “There speaks someone who’s never felt the earth dance beneath his feet.”

  “Truth, Wyrrn have precious little sense of the earth at all.”

  But even as Ryn spoke, his words struck a discordant note in Thorn, and for the most obvious and glaring of reasons: because, for a being far more at home at sea than on the land, this particular Wyr was leading them through the forest like a born woodsman. Still and all, he hadn’t lied; he might be the sole exception that proved the rule, that rare sport who walked between both domains. Something else about him was familiar; the pattern of his speech, the way he carried himself. Try as he might, however, Thorn couldn’t make the proper connections to solve the mystery. Since no element of what he saw or heard with any of his senses, physical and otherwise, suggested the slightest threat or danger to their party, he decide
d to honor Ryn’s privacy and leave well enough alone.

  Khory lifted Geryn from saddle to ground while Ryn stripped the animals of their gear, rummaging in their packs for something to feed them. They combined the horse blankets to make a lean-to that would give the Pathfinder a dry and fractionally comfortable place to lie, and Thorn took advantage of the steaming mineral water to mix both soup and poultice. The latter was exclusively for Geryn; the former, he made sufficient for all.

  Khory pursed her lips, savoring the feel and heat of the rich broth as well as its taste.

  “Good,” she said.

  “I had a good teacher.” His words were gentle, the emotions behind them far less so as his mind rolled back to those first weeks on the road. He’d shared the cooking chores at home and considered himself a fairly decent cook—until he met the brownies. Franjean was the worst; a self-styled gourmet of the highest discernment, he never let an opportunity pass to revel in the abyssal depths of Thorn’s ignorance of the culinary arts. There was nothing Thorn could attempt that Franjean and Rool hadn’t tasted better. The hell of it was, when Thorn attempted a turnabout and challenged his diminutive companions to try their own hands at a meal, they turned out to be right, that first dinner a wonder he still remembered. They proved to be foul taskmasters and worse teachers, but he persevered, watching, listening, learning from them as he did from the Powers he was slowly mastering. He knew they’d never consider him their peer, an honor they conferred on no one, but that mattered less with every passing year. It wasn’t the goal that mattered to him, he gradually discovered, but the joy of making the attempt.

  He felt a thumb wipe across the crest curve of his cheekbone and looked up to behold Khory.

  “My friends,” he said, not sure, not really caring, if she understood, “I miss them.”

  “Your friends,” she said pointedly, “need you.”

  Two of Geryn’s ribs were broken; that was a matter of gentling them back into place and reminding them of how they, and the lung they’d butted against, felt when they were whole and healthy. For the rest of the Pathfinder, the damage was mainly cosmetic, bruises and abrasions, the detritus of a determined thumping. Thorn spread the poultice across the whole of Geryn’s chest, to buttress the body’s natural defenses against any opportunistic infections. With the bulk of Geryn’s strength devoted to the active healing of his wounds, he was especially vulnerable to any wayward strands of disease that might be lurking about. Thorn had seen it happen before, in his early days before he knew better, save a body from the slash of a blade only to lose him after the fact from a bout with ague.

  The sun was near zenith before he was done, though none could tell from such a gray and formless sky. There was no discrimination between earth and air, they blended seamlessly in the distance as though the world had been resolved down to a globe of fluff. The only way to tell day from night was that during the day a body could more easily see.

  Thorn stretched until he heard his joints pop, then rubbed his face in his hands before moving fingers up to scourge the crown of his head. Geryn was asleep and Thorn wanted to join him.

  But a prickling sensation deep inside his skull brought his gaze around to Elora, sitting as far from the others as she could manage and not be under the snow, refusing to respond even to Ryn’s most charming approaches. She held her elbows tight to her body, and her legs were so close together they might have been a single limb.

  He didn’t ask “What’s wrong?”; the list of her answers would break his heart.

  “May I help?” was what he tried instead.

  “I…” she began, after a number of silent false starts. She held her mug of soup as tightly as she did herself; she hadn’t tasted a drop. He wondered what she made of this, probably the first night since infancy she’d spent outdoors.

  He held out a hand to lead her, used the other to set her soup aside for later.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded, balking as they reached the lip of the overhang that sheltered them.

  “Trust me,” he told her, praying she’d believe him this time.

  “It’s cold, and wet.”

  He swung his cloak off his own shoulders and onto hers, raising its hood to cover her head.

  “That better?”

  “I still want to know where I’m going.” Her voice took on a pouty quality that was ferociously unattractive. Probably made her minders want to slap her silly.

  “I assume you desire privacy. It’s more practical, and more polite, for us to move than to require everyone else to.”

  From the look she gave him, Thorn understood that was a concept as revolutionary as she found it unacceptable. She was the Sacred Princess Elora, after all; people were supposed to defer to her. Part of the natural order of things.

  Except that the natural order of snow was to fall in winter.

  There was a little niche below the pool, protected by a shelf of its own. He twisted the air slightly to waft a steady stream of warmth inside from the steam rising off the pool. Not an ideal toilet, but far better than they had any right to expect on the run.

  Elora simply stood there, almost at attention, even the straight parts of her clutched as tightly as her fists, the need to speak as absolute as the determination not to. He wondered suddenly if she knew what to do—Mark of the Maker, he thought in horror, she can’t have led that sheltered a life!

  “My gown,” she said at last, as if those words alone were sufficient explanation.

  When no response came, she fixed him with a basilisk glare.

  “My gown!”

  He approached, and with that closer look came comprehension. In some cases, the child had actually been sewn into her costume, far beyond the capacity of any person to dress or undress themselves unaided.

  It was a struggle, and more than once he almost called to Ryn for assistance, certain the Wyr’s fingers were far better suited to the task. He’d thought himself dexterous, prided himself on his needlework in fact, but as far as this job was concerned, he’d do better wearing steel mittens.

  There was another reason he wished himself away. This close to Elora, his InSight was keenly aware, and with each touch of her gown came wave after wave of imagery. To the girl, this costume had been a torment—and he caught recurrent flashes of physical memory from her through their bond, on levels far beneath those of active thought, of that awful night on the sacrificial altar at Nockmaar, his lips tightening at how her body blended Bavmorda’s attempted sacrifice with Elora’s own Ascension. Not so, to the crafters who built it. Into every scrap of fabric, every cut, every stitch went the love and prayers of a generation. There was as much art as skill in the making of the gown, all offered with hopeful hearts by folk who saw in Elora the end to suffering.

  To Thorn, they all had faces, and the longer he worked, the more real they became.

  Elora knew none of this and cared less. This was simply a dress, one more ordeal to endure in a life that was nothing else but.

  Her shift was just a pullover; he decided to let her manage that herself.

  “Well,” he heard when she finished her toilet, in that same infuriatingly imperious tone.

  He hazarded a look. She wore the shift. The rest of her gown was where he’d placed it.

  “Well?” he repeated back to her. She stared at him as if he was too dumb to live. And when that didn’t work, said, “I’ve worn these.” She brandished the gown. “I don’t wear clothes twice.”

  Ah, he thought.

  “You do now,” he said, and made the mistake of turning his back once more.

  She threw her clothes at him and screeched, “You should be flogged.”

  “You should be better behaved.” He picked them up as quickly as he could, before they became too sodden to carry—since some had landed in snow and others in the stream—and wished for a way of presenting Elora with the visions he had seen, the emotions felt. But a
ll her barriers were closed tight, the bond operating substantially one-way, and he didn’t need InSight to tell him forcing the issue would be fatally wrong.

  He fished in his pouch, pulling free a spare set of clothes and offering them to her.

  “Under the circumstances, this is the best we can do for you, Elora Danan.”

  “You will address me—”

  “By your name, as I always have,” he finished, cutting her off more sharply than he’d meant to. The tone of her voice was getting to him.

  “They’re ugly,” and to emphasize the point, she made a supremely ugly face. The joke on her, of course, was that it wasn’t a whole lot different from the expression she usually wore.

  “Actually, they’re mine. But we’re close to the same size still—”

  Now it was her turn to cut him off, not with words but by thrusting the offered garments back at him with such force that she sent him stumbling off balance; he had to scramble something fierce to keep from a nasty slip to the rocks.

  “I want nothing,” she snarled, “except to be rid of you forever!”

  She grabbed up her own clothing and made her way up the channel to the main cave. Thorn bit back a rejoinder and tried to do the same with the rage that gave it birth. Suddenly, as he was struggling to his own feet, a charge of energy set his fingertips tingling. He stayed on his knees, splaying both hands to their fullest extension, touching the stone more delicately than he would the most fragile sheet of rice paper that would shatter with a harsh breath. There was a sheen of water between them, formed by a slight hollow in the surface of the rock, and he willed it to be still, the surface growing flat and pristine as a piece of new-hardened glass.