"Calvian oak," the Knight explained laconically. "You remember the old saying?"
Sturm nodded. He knew rhymes and lore far better than leaves and trees. " 'Last to green and last to fall,' sir. Or so they say down in Solace."
"They say the same up here," Gunthar acknowledged. "Which is why it's so odd that I carry these leaves in winter, don't you think?"
He regarded Sturm with a calm, unreadable stare.
"I'm supposed to be going," the lad stated, crouching and picking up the sword. "That's what it means." The room seemed warm about him, and faintly through the window, the smell of flowers reached him on the back of a southeasterly breeze.
Chapter 5
Of Departures and Schemes
That morning, all but the boldest of them averted their eyes.
In the chilly, torchlit corridors, as the night turned and the bell of the third watch tolled deep and lonely, the squires began to stir, preparing their masters' armor and grumbling at the weather and the hour. It was a time that usually bristled with activity and horseplay and gossip, but on this morning, business stopped and conversation hushed as Sturm hastened by on his way to the stables. Silent, almost embarrassed, the Knights and squires averted their gazes. Even the servants, usually indifferent to Solamnic events, murmured as he passed and made signs of warding.
"Faring off a doomed man," Sturm muttered to himself as he stepped into the great central courtyard, into the dark and the flurried last snows of the season. Derek Crown-guard, long awake on mysterious business, stood a stone's throw from the stable door, shrouded in misted breath and blankets. A brace of Jeoffreys stood with him, his whey-faced partners in misdeed. Aristocrats all, and first families for generations back, the three of them had no morning duties, and Sturm could only guess what would lift them from warm beds and superior dreams.
As Sturm walked into the stable and reached for his saddle, which hung from its customary peg on the wall, he found it tied and tangled with dried vines, decorated bizarrely with branches of evergreen. He heard the laughter from outside and angrily tugged the saddle from the snarl of greenery. The vines snapped, he staggered with the saddle, and a chorus of young voices arose from the dark and the cold.
"Return this man to Huma's breast," they sang.
"Return this man to Huma's breast,
Beyond the wild, impartial skies,
Grant to him a warrior's rest
And set the last spark of his eyes
Free from the smothering clouds of wars
Upon the torches of the stars…"
Sturm stepped from the stable. Despite himself, he couldn't keep from smiling. After all, the boys were singing a Solamnic funeral song.
They finished the verse and stood scornfully in front of him. Derek Crownguard was flushed and breathless with off-key singing, but he loomed substantial in front of his rival, his leather armor pocked and blemished and dirty, his face in much the same shape. Behind him, two pale, bat-faced Jeoffreys wheezed with malicious laughter.
A crazed thought dawned on Sturm. If he were indeed to fulfill Derek Crownguard's wish and never return from this strange and misbegotten journey, why not leave as his father had left his mourning garrison that legendary night when Castle Brightblade fell? Indeed, why not leave them with laughter?
Suddenly, wildly, Sturm joined in the singing.
"Let the last surge of his breath
Take refuge in the cradling air
Above the dreams of ravens where
Only the hawk remembers death.
Then let his shade to Huma rise
Beyond the wild impartial skies…"
Louder and louder Sturm sang, drowning out first one Jeoffrey, then the other, then the ringleader Derek himself. Puzzled, a little frightened, the squires backed away from the stable, Sturm following them and singing louder still.
Thoroughly unnerved, the Jeoffreys turned and ran, leaving Derek backing through the courtyard alone. Sturm stepped up to him, singing still louder, until lights flickered and shone in the Tower windows as disgruntled Knights were jostled from their sleep by Derek's strangely backfired joke.
Quickly and more quickly the haughty squire backed up, the laughter all vanished from his face now as he looked into the hard eyes of this obviously mad southerner. So intent was Derek Crownguard on his retreat that he didn't notice the young gardener Jack, who had stopped behind him for a moment's rest in the unpleasant duty of hauling a wheelbarrow of manure away from the stables.
It was a true shame he did not notice.
Backward Derek toppled into the bed of the wheelbarrow, but his fall was cushioned by its rather fresh contents. He lurched from the wheelbarrow, stumbled, and fell, and Sturm finished the funeral song in a loud and exultant voice.
Stephan and Gunthar stood on the battlements above the boys, peering down on them and watching the strange morning music come to pass.
"All Brightblade, that one is," Lord Gunthar said softly to his old friend.
"Not all Brightblade," Stephan allowed. "But, the gods willing, he is Brightblade enough."
Sturm smiled again as he saddled his horse. He felt wild and unsettled and strangely free.
Derek had blushed and fumed and backed away, this time very carefully, leaving his first-family arrogance behind him in the snowy courtyard. Lord Boniface had emerged furiously from the steps leading to the Knight's Spur and caught the soiled squire by a clean sleeve.
"How dare you pass the morning in horseplay," Boniface growled, "when I've a hundred tasks remaining for you before sunrise!" They trooped away across the courtyard, the Knight berating his squire and battering him with question after obscure question. The gardener Jack covered a gap-toothed smile and pushed the wheelbarrow off after them, humming Sturm's tune ever so quietly.
Sturm chuckled as he watched the procession. No doubt Derek would be doused and then sent to his carpeted chambers now, angry and flustered, rehearsing what he should have done or said when the upstart from Solace turned on him, roaring with laughter and dirges.
"Give him a day, Luin," Sturm whispered to the mare, who snorted affably in the slowly dispersing dark of the stable. "Give Derek a day, and let me be far away on the road, and there's no telling what the story will be as to what took place this morning in the courtyard."
Already the castle grounds were defined in a pale gray light. The lamps in the tower seemed dim now, and overhead the bats and glowing vespertiles rushed to the safety of cave and lowland barnloft. Deep on the plains, the horizon took shape.
The sun had risen by the time Sturm led Luin into the courtyard and up to the southern gates. Lord Stephan was there to see him off, mist trailing through the white strands of his beard. Gunthar was there, too, and he inspected the young man sternly, making sure his horse was properly saddled and that his inherited armor fit him with Solamnic propriety.
"These ancestral arms are a bit… outsized, lad," Gunthar proclaimed in disappointment, staring skeptically at Angriff's breastplate, so wide and swallowing that it looked as if someone had dropped Sturm into a cage. "Perhaps you have a more suitable fit in your quarters?"
Sturm shook his head.
"A closer fit, yes, Lord Gunthar. But more suitable? I think not. For I am the Brightblade, called to a challenge by Lord Wilderness. My legacy rides with me to the gods know where." The lad masked a smile. It was a speech he had rehearsed while combing the mare, and he thought it was all resonant and Measured, a fitting exit line and a fitting prologue to his own great adventure.
Pompous little bumpkin, Lord Stephan thought with gentle amusement. Rattling about in that coffin of a breastplate. We'll see how well 'the Brightblade' and his legacy weather the coming news.
"The gods know where, indeed, Sturm Brightblade," Stephan announced aloud as the great oaken gates of the Clerist's Tower opened behind him. "But your first destination is no doubt the Southern Darkwoods, and the way to that place Lord Vertumnus… insists on showing you, it seems."
Sturm's eyes widened as he looked over Stephan's shoulder. Inexplicably, vines had grown from the cobblestones at the foot of the Southern Gates, spreading over the huge passageway like an enormous green web. And out on the wings of Habbakuk, tumbling south and east into the rocky foothills, a narrow swath of grass had risen from nowhere. Overnight it had spread from the gates of the castle down onto the Solamnic Plains. As bright as green fire it was, and as flawless as a ribbon or a dignitary's carpet.
"A good host he is, this Vertumnus," Sturm jested weakly, rubbing his shoulder, which all of a sudden had begun to throb. "A good host indeed, to guide me from the Tower to his hold." His words felt thin in the misted air.
"I trust the venture is not as dark as your friend Crown-guard makes it," Lord Stephan insisted. "Nonetheless, I cannot lie and say the path will be easy. But may the Dragon and the Mantis guide you also, and may the Gray Book open and show you its wisdom."
Waxing pompous myself, Lord Stephan thought. Must be the hour and the greenery. For it had taken the Knights by surprise, too-Vertumnus's magic leading up to the very gates of the stronghold. A narrow swath of green it was, but powerful. Lord Gunthar had stepped from the gates and touched it, first with his sword, and then with his bare hand. Stephan had followed suit, and the spring grass felt warm and pliant between his fingers, and with the touch had come a strange, undefinable yearning for the depths of the wilderness, for the fastness and green of the forest.
"May the Dragon and the Mantis guide you," he whispered again as Sturm led his horse gingerly through the maze of greenery out onto Vertumnus's magical path. Boniface and Gunthar watched from the walls, too, and to all three of the Knights, the lad seemed frail, forever unprepared. Again Lord Stephan regretted that Oath and Measure prevented the lot of them from taking up arms and following.
Brightblade the lad might be-indeed, Lord Angriff's son he was, in image and spirit. But what lay ahead…
Boniface dragged his sputtering squire to a secluded spot off the gardens. It was near a shed, where the gardeners' tools lay amid broken statuary and the wreckage of a gnomish irrigation system that had never worked in the first place.
Boniface looked about him and quickly set upon his hapless nephew.
"Is everything in place, Derek?"
"Ev-everything?" the boy stammered nervously.
"Everything, you pampered little fool! The trap at the ford, the mare's malady, the ambush, the surprise at the village, the-"
"Unc-Lord Boniface, please!" Derek urged in a whisper, nodding frantically in the direction of Jack, who was serenely dumping the manure on the pile at the foot of the garden. The gardener wiped his hands and shuffled carefully through a maze of flowers, where he knelt and examined the green bud of a green rose.
"Never mind him!" the Knight ordered, his voice low and menacing. "Only a servant and simpleton he is, but perhaps even he would have done better in preparing the surprises for that fool of a Brightblade."
"You may rest assured, sir," Derek replied coldly, his anger and dignity rising. "By Paladine and all the gods of good, you may know that everything you planned for Sturm Brightblade is in place and awaits only his… his honorable presence."
At those words, the great Solamnic swordsman relaxed and loosened his grip on the squire. With a curious smile, he regarded the lad in front of him.
'Those are strange gods for your oath, Derek Crownguard. Strange gods indeed."
Sturm marveled at how the green strand followed the route he had chosen and planned.
Down through the Wings of Habbakuk it fared, skirting the Hart's Forest, that small thicket that housed, among evergreens and maples, the only vallenwoods in the Vingaard foothills. Southward it glittered, fading from sight in the morning mists but undeniably leading toward the river, toward the provinces of Lemish beyond, and toward the heart of that troubled country where the Southern Darkwoods lay.
It was almost as though his journey had been mapped for him. Yet even though the Green Man had charted his way, the Plains of Solamnia no longer permitted a safe and simple passage, for the times had changed since the great heroic ages of Vinas Solamnus, Bedal Brightblade, and Huma Dragonbane-ages when the country was righteous and just, defended from its enemies by strong lance and stronger beliefs.
Now it was nearly impossible to imagine those ancient times. The countryside had turned in violence and anger against the Knights. Peasants rebelled, Nerakan bandits raided the eastern borders, and darker things still were rumored to have settled in the heartlands-gibbering, scaled things, reptilian and sly, that snatched babies and slaughtered livestock, things that passed through the villages of a night like a cold wind, fingering thatch and masonry, rattling doors…
Sturm shuddered. Before him, the plains stretched to the edge of sight, mist-covered and flecked with the rust of dead heather, over which the green swath stretched like a glittering sash. It was a faceless landscape and harsh, where the country could lose him for days if the path failed or he wandered unwarily. The place had a peculiar silence to it, as if the wind had no voice here.
Beneath him, Luin whickered serenely and stopped to graze on Vertumnus's bright pathway. Sturm turned in the saddle and looked back into the Vingaard Mountains, where the great spire of the High Clerist's Tower glistened in the midmorning sunlight. Though the road back was scarcely a three-hour journey, the tower seemed remote, as though it sat firmly in the heart of another age.
He turned once again to the green way. It stretched ahead of him, over an imagined route that seemed suddenly hostile. Over the swiftly flowing Vingaard River, down into the hobgoblin strongholds of Throt-and all of this only a prelude to the Darkwoods themselves and to whatever Vertumnus had in mind.
"Why, the getting there alone could kill me," Sturm whispered uneasily.
Indeed the getting there for some had been perilous. Stories of danger on the Solamnic roads were plentiful and grim. There was the caravan from Caergoth, missing for days, whose wagons were found still rolling along the road to Thelgaard Keep, the horses still in the traces, though their drivers and passengers had vanished entirely. There were also the dozen pilgrims from Kaolyn, bound for the shrines at Palanthus, whose bodies, noosed and dangling from the low limbs of vallenwoods, were scarcely more than husks by the time Lord Gunthar's search party discovered them.
Sturm rubbed his eyes and wrapped his cloak more tightly about his shoulders. Twice he had imagined someone was following him, but when he looked behind him, he saw only pale sunlight, only wind through the high grass.
The dwarves told even darker stories, he knew, his imagination still racing. How in order to lure kindhearted victims into a lonely and treacherous spot, hobgoblins had learned to mimic the cry of a human infant, so that in the thick recesses of a fog…
Fog! Sturm stood upright in the stirrups. While he was wool-gathering, the mare had stopped on the greenway, serenely eating the path in front of them.
Tendrils of mist, unnaturally pale, rose like spirits out of the plains around him. The sun was oblique and muted. The air was white, gray at the greater distances where the rising mist blocked the sunlight altogether.
Sturm leaned forward and squinted, his hand on his sword. So it wasn't evening, after all, but a deep fog. He clucked his tongue at the mare, and warily Luin began to move again, placing one foot cautiously before the other as though she walked through a swamp or along an unsteady precipice.
Then music rose out of nowhere, an old hornpipe in a minor key. Sturm drew his sword and wheeled about in the saddle, but everywhere was mist and music, and nothing more than that. At once he felt foolish, as if he had drawn his sword to fight the air.
"Come out, Vertumnus!" Sturm muttered, his voice rising with his anger. "Get out from behind your fog and nonsense, and let's settle this. Sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man!"
But the music continued serenely, perpetually, the tune varying and doubling back on itself, always recognizable and yet never the same. The fog began to danc
e to the music, swirling and shifting in a mad, encircling reel. Now Sturm could no longer see the ground. It was as though Luin waded through shallow, indefinite waters.
Cautiously the lad dismounted and walked beside his mare, each step light and doubtful. He could no longer feel the newly grown grass, and he was beginning to wonder if the ground itself had turned to mist.
"The keep… is Vingaard Keep to the left? The setting sun…" Sturm muttered. Directions were useless now, even if he could remember them in the midst of this infernal, confusing music. The rules of the road were changing rapidly, and he hated himself for being already lost.
For an hour or so, Sturm trudged on through the murk, his path winding hopelessly and his thoughts slipping from bewilderment into alarm.
Quite abruptly, the music stopped. The silence that followed was again breathless and hostile, as though the plains themselves were hushed in the expectation of some terrible crime. Sturm felt his sword shake in his hand.
For a few minutes, he continued his wandering, his steps even more tentative. The hooting of an owl in a blasted oak sounded like a call from the land of the dead, and once or twice the lad thought he heard a baby crying nearby. The sounds brought him dangerously close to panic. Twice he set foot to stirrup but both times gathered his wits and thought better of it.
" 'Tis all you'd need!" he whispered angrily. "A nasty fall from a horse in a deep fog! Crack your skull and drive out what little brains you have left!"
Finally, suspecting that he might even be headed back toward the Tower, Sturm decided to stop and wait out the fog. "For wouldn't it please Derek Crownguard," he asked Luin, "if I were simply to walk out of the mist in front of the great southern gate, having turned myself entirely about in a terror?"
He gritted his teeth. "By Huma!" he swore, "I'd rather die than give that scoundrel a moment's triumph!"
Luin rolled her long nose over the lad's shoulder and nibbled his hair thoughtfully.
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