Sturm winced. The road to the Darkwoods looked longer and longer as Mara spoke.
"But enough of that," Mara declared. "You asked how we came to last night and this pass."
Sturm shifted the bundle again. The eggs of spiders? Rocks? Houses? What was bound in the blankets and leaves and webbing?
"Immediately Lord Cyren took a liking to me," Mara said. "He paid court with his eyes in the altering light, in the song of the harp and the deep cello. But I was a servingmaid, my family a trophy of war. And though Cyren was handsome, I set aside thoughts of those eyes and those songs, for ours was a match too farfetched to imagine. And more than that, he was a strange and exotic one-almost without history, he was, from the far reaches of the forest, and of his many cousins, none had met him and few had heard of him."
She traveled on in silence, and it was a while before she spoke again.
"Notes he sent me in the days that followed-notes borne on small leaf-boats such as a child makes as a plaything. He floated his messages downstream on the slow-moving Thon-Thalas as I stood in the current, thigh-deep in water, washing the clothing of my mistress. His words would scorn and tease and inveigle, luring me away with him.
"There was a bridge, wrote Cyren, at the westernmost edge of the forest. If I were to consent to go away with him, I should meet him at the bridge by moonlight, and we would ride away together out of Silvanesti, over the Plains of Dust to a land where Kagonesti and Silvanesti are indistinguishable, where folk couldn't tell High Elf from Wild Elf."
"There are such lands," Sturm offered. "I do believe Solamnia is one of them."
"Even the Knights can tell elf from spider," Mara retorted bitterly. "But that comes later in the story.
"Let it be said now that Cyren Calamon of the House Royal sent his green fleet down the Thon-Thalas daily, and each night I would return to my mistress's tower, leaving his notes unanswered. It is improper for a maiden to be so… forward. He persisted and persisted, until I knew that, had his intentions been dishonorable, he would have left off long ago. It was then I consented to meet with him-not at his bridge where the wood ended and the lands beyond our borders beckoned in freedom and wildness, but at a safer place, at the ferry west of Silvanost. It was a place out of sight from the marble fastness of the great encampment, where King Lorac and his daughter Alhana live in the Tower of Stars, and yet it was a place less… venturesome and hidden than the ones my new friend proposed to me.
"We were foolish in our eagerness. Though our meetings were cautious, even proper, someone saw and someone disapproved. Perhaps," she added ominously, "someone was jealous. And someone spread the story of our tryst through the House Royal. My duties were changed, the quarters of my mistress moved to the high chambers of the Tower of Stars. 'Twas an honor for her-an emptyheaded little fluff who thought her stature raised with her altitude, never quite aware that her newfound position at court had anything to do with her servantry. But it was torment for me.
"So we suffered the months, both of us lonely, both of us yearning for escape and reunion, for a midnight flight to a place where lineage and ancestry mattered not at all."
"There is no such place!" Sturm exclaimed, then fell silent immediately, surprised at his vehemence. Mara didn't seem to notice, her mind on the rest of her story.
'The tale turns even darker here, Solamnic. For Cyren was barred from the Tower, and the high windows were beyond his reach unless he had the wings of a bird or could climb…"
"Like a spider?" Sturm asked.
"Like a spider indeed," Mara said with a nod. "You see the plan, do you not? Well, know it for what it was-a foolhardy risk. As it has done for thousands of years, love sent the unwise heart to sorcerers. To Master Calotte went Cyren, in the darkest part of the forest, where Waylorn's Tower lies gray and windowless, its shadow mingling with the shades of willow and aspen until all light, whether moon or sun, is blocked by leaf and branch and turret. They say the butterflies are black there, and that the squirrels have gone blind because it is so dark that they steer by smell and hearing alone, their eyes grown useless through the generations."
Sturm hid a smile. It sounded fanciful to him, this dark place of the mage. But he listened as Mara unfolded the sad end of the story.
Under the guise of helpfulness, it seems, Master Calotte had hidden his own passion for Mara. An old elf, and to hear the girl tell it, unspeakably hideous, he held no more hope of winning her than she had in the sincerity of Cyren's courtship. Nor would enchantment avail for old Calotte, for the House of Mystics had ways to tell when a creature was charmed or drawn or otherwise magicked, and the Silvanesti refused to honor a conjured marriage. But all things seemed possible if the old mage were crafty and circumspect.
"It was simple," Mara explained angrily as she and Sturm settled for the afternoon on a rocky knoll in the midst of the grasslands. "Simple to fool a trusting Cyren, who came to him in desperation. Simple, when someone is ready and willing, to transform him into any creature the mind can fancy or memory bring forth. Simple for Cyren it was to clamber up the side of the Tower of Stars, to the window where I sat waiting."
Mara smiled, stretching her legs on the hard ground. Sturm stood above her, staring out over the Solamnic plains, where deep in the eastern distances, he thought he saw the haze and shimmer of water. Were they near the Vingaard, or were these the mirages travelers reported from Thelgaard Keep to the City of Lost Names?
"I was startled at first. If a spider twice your size perched on your windowsill, gibbering and beckoning you outside, you would be cautious, too."
Sturm nodded. "Cautious" hadn't been the word that occurred to him.
"But quickly Cyren made it known to me that he was no ordinary spider, but my true love transformed."
"How did he do that?" Sturm asked with a muffled smile, imagining the creature serenading in its shrill, inhuman voice, or weaving Mara's name into the strands of its web.
"Spun a ladder of sorts, he did. A scaffolding web, the druids call it, for upon it, the creatures raise web from tree to tree, the intricate spokes and spirals that draw down their quarry from the air. But it was only a ladder, this scaffolding. It dropped down the side of the tower sixty, seventy feet, from my window down into the dark of the branches below it.
"By Branchala, I was frightened!" she laughed. "The moons were dark that night, so I could descend unseen, but it made me unseeing as well. Set one foot below the next as if I was wading into vipers, I did, but the next thing I know, my feet touch the grass of the forest floor and Cyren is rushing west toward Waylorn's Tower, and stopping, and turning about, and spinning a strand of web behind him that I take up and follow like… like your mare following the rein.
"So we passed through the woods, and eye saw me not, nor did ear hear me as we crossed the Thon-Thalas and made our way through a part of the forest I knew not, to a clearing at the foot of the tower."
She shuddered as the memory passed over her.
"The moment I saw that the spellcraft was the doing of Master Calotte," she said, "I feared for us-especially for poor Cyren. For I had seen this one look at me, too, with a look that made my blood crawl, and I feared that his aid had come at a dreadful cost. Nor was it a moment before we learned what we had to pay."
Mara stood up and, taking Luin's reins, gestured to Sturm that the rest had ended, that the time had come to recommence the journey. Down from the knoll they walked, Luin stepping gingerly behind them, the spider a rustling, muttering presence in the high grass as the elf maiden unveiled the last and darkest part of the story.
"As you can certainly guess, Solamnic, the wizard refused to restore Cyren. He sat there, lodged in the notch of a forked oak, black and rotten and shadowed as his own heart.
" 'Mara,' he says, 'sweet Mara. You know well how Prince Cyren can recover that form in which you so delight, and you know full well the cost.' "
"Scoundrel," Sturm muttered.
"Cyren would have attacked him then and there!" Mara ex
claimed. "Would have torn him apart and dripped cold poison into his wounds, had I not restrained him. But the death of Master Calotte, as far as we knew, would imprison poor Cyren forever in the form in which you see him today."
Sturm looked back at the elf maiden skeptically. Having grappled with Cyren himself, having seen the creature blubber and slink off into the woods, he wondered how truly difficult it had been for Mara to restrain the avenging creature.
"Now," Mara said, "we know better. But then we left Silvanesti as a place no longer safe for either of us: I, after all, had defied the will of the House Royal. So had poor Cyren, and his lot was worse, for his newfound form would make him prey to any hunter from the Hedge to the Bay of Balifor.
"We wandered a year and another, in search of a way to lift the spell of Master Calotte. To sorcerers and shamans we traveled, as far south as the Icewall, west to the Tower of Wayreth in Qualinesti, then back again along a different and difficult path, through Bloten and Zhakar and Khurikhan, where elves are as unwelcome as spiders. Our third year found us on the plains of Abanasinia, where we took up for a while with a band of Plainsmen, whose seeress was a mere girl, a chieftain's daughter of the Que-Shu tribe, subject to the falling sickness and deep trances, in which the grasslands sang to her and the stars reconfigured above her in the shapes of helix and harp."
"True prophecies, then," Sturm observed.
Mara nodded. "This… this Goldmoon," she continued, "told us that the spell could be lifted only through music and the convergence of the moons above this very spot in the midst of the Plains of Solamnia.
"So we dwelt here awaiting, Cyren and I. A year and more passed, while I learned to play on the flute the girl had given me, and the moons passed through the sign of Hiddukel, of Kiri-Jolith, of dark Morgion-all pointing to the single night, the crowning night of a five-year cycle, on which the moons converged in the hub of Mishakal and healing and change were possible."
Mara stopped on the downward path. Sturm paced on for a few heavy steps, the bundle on his shoulders again growing wearisome. He stopped finally and turned about when he could hear neither her voice nor her footsteps.
She stood above him, angry and diminished by the sunlight of the early afternoon. Despair contorted her face, and though her anger at Sturm had somehow passed in the telling of the story, she looked at him again with rising irritation.
"That night," she said coldly, "that most auspicious night, when the moons converge and the music plays and the spell is lifted-that night was last night!"
Briskly, her thoughts obviously elsewhere, the elf maiden tugged at the reins and resumed her path down the hill. Luin, jarred from drowsiness, snorted and followed her. Ahead of them, Sturm turned back to the journey with an inward grumble.
"Again and again I am visited with my accident," he muttered. "It was… it was a reasonable mistake!"
He looked back at Mara, who seemed not to hear him.
"Rocky plains on foot," the lad whispered through clenched teeth, "with a two-ton burden and a whining companion, my horse hobbled and a giant poisonous spider lurking somewhere behind us. 'Tis not a quest for heroes, I'll wager, but at least the going can get no worse from here."
The clouds rushed in before anyone noticed, as though a god had stirred the air with a quick wave of his hand. Suddenly the country was heavy and tense, the smell of the wind faint and metallic. Then the first drop struck the bundle on Sturm's back, and another splashed against the bridge of his nose. Luin whinnied apprehensively, and the skies opened up from the Clerist's Tower all the way to the Vingaard River, which tilted and boiled in the fierce downpour of rain.
Chapter 10
A Change in the Weather
In the Southern Darkwoods, kneeling above the clear green pool in the midst of the clearing, Vertumnus stirred the waters playfully. His fingers skimmed the surface of the pool, showering droplets over the image of Sturm and Mara trapped in a rainstorm miles away. Evanthe and Diona watched delightedly as the image shivered and dispersed and formed again.
"Drown them!" Evanthe hissed wickedly, her pale hands brushing a lock of hair from the Green Man's brow.
"Drench and douse them!" urged Diona.
"Only a rain," Vertumnus laughed and stirred the waters again. "The grass needs watering."
"Only a rain?" Evanthe whispered. "Only a rain, when you could do such marvels…"
"As the winds would rumor for ages," Diona coaxed, finishing her sister's sentence. 'The things you could do, Lord Wilderness, had you the mind and the imaginings and… and the gumption!"
Vertumnus ignored the dryads, crouched, and breathed on the surface of the waters.
In the pool's misty reflection, seen from afar, as though they appeared in a crystal ball or a Dragonorb, the young man and the elf maiden huddled together, gray shapes in the driving rain. Suddenly, from the bundled shadows an arm lifted, pointing toward a hillside, a distant shelter. They hastened toward it, their shapes dwindling into the net of rain. Behind them, scuttling and gibbering to itself, a drenched spider followed tamely.
"Rain falls on the just," Vertumnus murmured, and waved his hand over the pool, "and the unjust."
The mists parted on the surface of the water, revealing an encampment in a copse-a tattered web between two junipers, and a thatch-covered cabin only recently abandoned. The waters of the pool stilled and settled, and at the edge of the image, a hooded light bobbed from reflected tree to reflected tree-a lantern in the hand of a dark, caped figure.
"Ah," sighed Lord Wilderness and leaned forward until his face nearly touched the surface of the water. Quietly he whistled something in the magical tenth mode, which the old bards used to look through rock and over distance and sometimes into the future.
The image shivered, and the dark man in the copse lifted the lantern to his own inscrutable face.
"Boniface!" Vertumnus exclaimed. "Of course!"
Quietly, efficiently, the finest swordsman in Solamnia inspected the clearing and encampment. He stepped into the cabin and emerged, almost in one breath, frowning and looking about. Stroking his long, dark mustache, he stood beneath the broken web, apparently lost in thought, and then, as if he had known all along the direction in which his search would take him, wheeled about and vanished from the clearing, the blue evergreens closing behind him like the water's surface over a diver.
"Who is he?" Evanthe breathed.
"Yes," Diona echoed. "Who is he? And why does he follow them?"
"Just a shadow in the snow," Vertumnus replied. "But where is the mistress? For her path will cross with his."
The dryads looked at one another in disappointment.
"That hag?" Diona asked scornfully. "What would you with her, when the likes of us are here?"
"That old carrion bird," Evanthe said. "She smells of dark earth and death. No herbs in creation can cover those smells."
"Where is she?" Vertumnus repeated.
And as he awaited her arrival, he stared at the settling surface of the pool and lifted the flute to his lips.
"This will make a lean-to of sorts," Sturm sputtered as he spread his cloak between outstretched branches of oak and water maple. A makeshift tent, it was, but already the cloth sagged with the downpour.
"Of sorts, it will," Mara said. "But not a good one. The rock is limestone here. Cave country, I'll wager."
"Then you have my blessing to search for caves," Sturm said curtly. The long trek and the rain had worn away his patience. Silently he knotted the last corner of his cape to a maple limb, then stood back to admire his handiwork.
Eagerly, water beading and flickering on his bulbous black abdomen, Cyren scurried into the patchwork shelter. He crouched, obscured behind a thicket of his own legs, and rumbled contentedly as Mara, standing outside in the rain, turned impatiently to face her Solamnic companion.
"You're no woodsman, are you?" she asked, as the cape bellied with water and the branches leaned together.
Sturm watched glumly as his enc
ampment collapsed, sending a sputtering, chittering Cyren out into the rain and halfway up a nearby oak. It was then that the music rose again, weaving through the rain and rising loudly above Cyren's scolding and the intermittent crashes of thunder. Mara looked at Sturm in astonishment.
In turn, he looked back at her, masking his own considerable surprise.
"We'll follow the sound," he said. "And if there are caves we are meant to find… well, we will find them."
The elf opened her mouth to protest, but her odd escort with his serious demeanor and ill-fitting armor had turned away from her, plunging into the sheeted rain.
Mara couldn't see Sturm's smile of amusement, for this magical music might inveigle and distract him, might lead him astray or dump him in a swamp somewhere. But this one evening, Vertumnus had done him two favors: The music led him somewhere, at least. And it had stopped the infernal elven complaining.
* * * * *
The nearest cave was less than a mile from the copse. Cyren spotted it first from above. Rumbling excitedly, he motioned his companions toward the small, bramble-covered mouth of the cave. But his enthusiasm cooled when Sturm made it clear that Cyren should precede them into the darkness. The idea, of course, was that a giant spider made a more formidable entrance than young man or elf maiden, but Cyren moved cautiously, extending one leg, then another, then a third, as though he walked over coals. Clicking nervously and startling at his own echo, he poked his head into the cavern, then backed out again, staring at Sturm so dolefully that he might have been pathetic had he not been so ugly.
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