The corner that the Host cut was called the Grimly Holt. It was hardly as intimidating as the deep woods would have been, but the Kencyr still looked askance at its dense undergrowth and the green shadows of its maple and birch. The shattered remains of an old road led through it. Even when the road was new, though, it had never been well traveled, for the Holt had its own denizens, and they objected to traffic.
All day, the vanguard of the Host saw quick flickers of movement in the undergrowth, and their horses danced nervously. Harn would have sent scouts out to investigate, but Torisen sharply forbade it. Harn and Burr exchanged glances. The Highlord had scarcely spoken to anyone in days and often moved as if in a waking dream. He barely slept at all since the White Hills. Burr noted that when not riding, Torisen limped more than ever. Harn wondered if the judgment of a sleep-starved man, even this one, could be fully trusted. Both remembered the White Hills and what had happened the last time Torisen had led them off the road. Dusk fell, and a murmur as of wind passed under the leaves. But none of them moved.
Abruptly, a stone whizzed out of the twilight and struck Burr on the shoulder, almost unhorsing him. In a moment, the air was full of flying objects, some rocks, some softer, but no less objectionable. From the undergrowth came an excited yapping. Torisen spurred Storm off the road into a small glade.
"Hoy, Grimly!" he shouted at the surrounding forest. "Stop that!"
The hail of stones ceased instantly. Again the murmur of rapid question and answer, and then a sudden, joyful yelp:
"Hoy, Tori!"
A shaggy figure erupted from the undergrowth. Torisen dismounted. By the time Ardeth and his war-guard came charging into the clearing, the Highlord was trying to disengage himself from the glad embrace of a young man wearing a wolf's pelt —or was it his own? All around them, other hairy figures had emerged from the forest to watch.
"Lord Ardeth, my friend the Wolver Grimly, luckily at home. He spends part of the year at King Krothen's court, playing the wild man and studying rendish poetry."
The Wolver grinned. All his teeth came to very sharp points.
That night, he and his people set a feast for all of the High Council who would come to the ruined keep that served as their lair. They ate by torchlight, sitting on mossy blocks beside a brook that gurgled down the length of what had once been the keep's main hall; and forest folk passed among them, shy, wild eyes glowing red in the firelight, filling horns with honey mead. Out in the Holt, the rest of the pack sang in yelps and long, crooning wails which took on the rhythms of some complex poetry.
"You know," said Lord Danior to Torisen in a low voice, "these wolves aren't anything like what I expected. All those horror stories must be pretty exaggerated, huh?"
"That depends. Grimly's people live according to their own system of ethics, and on the whole are less prone to violence than the average human. But the farther into the Weald you go, the wilder things get. The wolvers of the deep-wood Holts are as bad as you can imagine, if not a good deal worse."
"Yes, but how did any of them end up in King Krothen's court? I mean, they're hardly my idea . . ."
"Of courtiers?" The Wolver popped up beside him with a toothy grin. "Now, that's a word to spit at. I'm a poet, friend. A poet!"
"Grimly," said Torisen, "stop making faces and tell him the story. Once upon a time, when you were just a cub . . ."
"There was a king who loved to hunt. His name was Kruin of Kothifir, and he was King Krothen's father. Now, Kruin had gone after all sorts of game: rhi-sar in the Southern Wastes, rathorn, once even an Arrin-ken—the last without success, I'm glad to say. Then some fool told him about the Weald. The next thing we knew, he had arrived on our doorstep with a hunting party the size of a young army. He took over this keep as his base camp. We hid, of course, and when he went into the deep-wood, some of us followed."
"Why?" Danior demanded.
"Curiosity, mainly. Then too, we don't often see our wilder cousins of the deep-woods—or want to, for that matter—but here was a chance to go visiting with what amounted to an armed escort. Well, the escort didn't last long. There are more ways to get yourself killed in the deep Weald than you can imagine. Within a day, Kruin was down to a handful of men, long before he'd gotten far enough to meet even the least . . . uh . . . impetuous of our cousins. And he was lost too, just for good measure. Well, by this time we'd gotten tired of watching men die in singularly unaesthetic ways, so we led the survivors out."
"I trust Kruin was suitably grateful," said Ardeth.
The Wolver grinned. "He accused us of ruining the best hunt he'd been on in years. He'd come to the Weald to get a wolver pelt for his trophy wall, he said; but he was a fair man. If any of us cared to go back to Kothifir with him, he would find us an appropriate place in his court. The place that immediately occurred to us was that trophy wall, so we said we'd think about it. Well, I thought about it for some fifteen years until I came of age. Then I went south to Kothifir."
"By then, Krothen was on the throne," said Torisen. "Luckily, Krothen doesn't hunt . . ."
"Most days, he doesn't even move," the Wolver interposed.
". . . and he hated his father. So the trophy wall had long since been torn down, and Grimly became a poet instead of a pelt. The work he does in his own language is quite good—the pack is performing some of it now—but when he recites his poetry in rendish, it's the audience that usually howls."
After that, the talk became general. Ashe arrived at the feast late and ate nothing. She left, unnoticed, before Harn came in from checking down the line of camps. Soon after that, most of the other Kencyr left to rejoin their people and get some much needed sleep. Torisen stayed. So did Burr, determined not to let the Highlord out of his sight. He settled down in the shadows of the ruined hall to wait, but soon began to feel the effect of the holt-dwellers' potent mead. His lord's face, pale and fine-drawn, floated before him in midair. Opposite it, the Wolver's white teeth and red eyes gleamed in the firelight. Their talk ran together, merging with the brook's burble.
Then something fell with a crash. Burr started up blurry eyed, and saw that Torisen's mead horn had slipped out of his hand. The Wolver caught the Highlord as he started to topple forward.
"Venom in the wine," they both heard him say indistinctly.
"Wine?" Burr repeated, confused. "Venom?"
"Here." The Wolver thrust Torisen into the Kendar's steadying arms and dropped to all fours beside the puddle of split mead. He sniffed at it, then took a cautious lap.
Torisen shuddered violently, breaking out of the light doze into which he had fallen. He saw the Wolver still crouching at his feet and gave a shaky laugh. "There's nothing in your good mead but an uncommon amount of alcohol, Grimly. I must be more tired than I thought. No." A bewildered, almost frightened look flickered across his face. "There was more to it than that. I was almost asleep when something down in the dark caught and tugged at me. Hard. And then I began to slip away from the light."
"Tentir," muttered Burr.
"Yes, like that." Torisen absentmindedly rubbed his leg where the wyrm had bitten it. "Something has happened; what, I don't know. Damnit, I don't want to know! Things are complicated enough as it is. Grimly, Burr—just humor me and help me stay awake tonight, as if my soul depended on it." He shivered. "Who knows? It might."
It was a long night. When dawn came at last, Burr was left with the feeling that they had merely postponed the danger, whatever it was. At the breakfast council, Caineron gave Torisen such a look, half speculation, half smug satisfaction, that Burr longed to shove the Highborn's fat face into the nearest pile of manure. He took some pleasure, though, in Caineron's thunderstruck expression a little later when Torisen rode up to the vanguard with a huge gray wolf trotting at his stirrup.
By noon on the twenty-second of Winter, they were back on the River Road.
* * *
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Ardeth sat in the reception chamber of his tent, sipping pale blue wine. Outside, the night c
ry passed from sentry to sentry while more than half the camp lay in the healing grip of dwar sleep. A mild breeze blew through the gauze tent flaps. It was very late on the twenty-fourth with some three hundred miles left to go. In five days, the Host should reach the Cataracts where, they hoped, Prince Odalian's forces would be waiting. And the Horde? Ardeth glanced at the map spread out on the camp table before him. There had been no word from the Southern Wastes since that message at Wyrden; but if the Horde was moving at its usual fifteen mile a day crawl, it was probably well within one hundred miles of the Cataracts. As Brandan had said back at Gothregor, this was going to be close.
Ardeth sipped more wine. Its bouquet hid the disagreeable smell of the hemlock, but didn't mask the juice's bitter taste. Still, he had developed a liking for the stuff during his career as a diplomat nearly a century ago, and it did help to calm him. He needed to be calm now.
On the table beside the map lay the coded report of his agent in Kothifir. It had arrived just that evening. The news was nearly a month old, but the agent hadn't been able to get his report out sooner because Krothen had put every Kencyr left in the city under house arrest. He was furious because Pereden had marched out the Southern Host to meet the Horde against his orders.
Pereden.
Ardeth sipped more wine.
Of course, the boy might have had information that made it essential for him to lead out his forces immediately. At the very least, his suicidal attack on the Horde had bought the Northern Host time that it desperately needed. But at what cost? The worst military debacle since Urakarn . . .
Calmly, old man, calmly, he told himself. You don't know that for certain yet.
In fact, what if the message at Wyrden announcing the massacre had been a fraud? Torisen had seemed to trust it, but for all his cleverness the Highlord wasn't infallible. Perhaps instead of the reported pitched battle, Pereden had simply used his forces to harry the enemy. Perhaps he would emerge as a hero after all. Yes, perhaps; but Ardeth couldn't forget the petulant tone of Pereden's dispatches ever since he had joined the Southern Host, complaining first because Ardeth had given command to Torisen and later because (he claimed) his officers weren't giving him adequate support.
Ardeth wondered if Torisen knew that Pereden had led out the Southern Host against orders. Thinking back to what the Highlord had said at various times, and more importantly, to what he hadn't, Ardeth concluded that he had indeed known for quite some time. Probably one of his former officers with the Southern Host had passed on the news. Then why hadn't he shared it with the man whom it most concerned? Could the Highlord be playing a game of his own? It seemed unlikely, but Ardeth still knew far less about Torisen than he liked, despite all the years the young man had served him. Then too, it was becoming increasingly difficult to control a game in which one's principal player continually made unexpected, even erratic moves. Damn. He had to find out what was going on before Caineron made some half-witted play of his own that finished them all.
Voices spoke softly out by the watchfire. Ardeth recognized one of them. Ah, now here was someone who might tell him something, if properly asked. He beckoned to his servant and murmured an instruction. The man went out. A moment later, Kindrie appeared at the tent flap and stood there blinking in the light. The breeze ruffled his white hair.
"You wished to see me, my lord?"
"Come in, come in." Ardeth gestured graciously to a camp chair that his servant had just unfolded and set next to the table. "Sit down and share a cup of wine with me. It's just occurred to me that we haven't had a really good talk since . . . when?"
"Before the White Hills, my lord." Kindrie sat down and accepted a glass of pale blue wine. He seemed ill at ease.
"Ah, yes." Ardeth smiled benignly at him. "And how have my folk been treating you? No complaints, I hope?"
"None, my lord." Kindrie swallowed some wine and almost made a face at its bitter taste. He rested the glass on his knee, both hands cupped around it. "They've treated me remarkably well considering—" He stopped short.
"Yes?"
"Considering that I'm a Shanir."
"I hadn't forgotten," said Ardeth dryly. "Actually, quite a few Shanir serve me. My other people have, I hope, learned to treat them with respect. After all, once all our greatest lords were acknowledged Shanir and many of them blood-binders at that."
"That was a long time ago," Kindrie muttered into his glass. He took another cautious sip.
"Times change, and change again," said Ardeth enigmatically. He eyed Kindrie's glass. "My dear boy, you should have said that you disliked hemlock. I could have offered you something else. But I see that you've already dealt with the problem."
Kindrie blushed. With an abrupt gesture almost of defiance, he put his glass on the table. His wine had entirely lost its poisonous blue color.
"Very impressive," murmured Ardeth. "The priesthood lost a powerful healer in you, didn't it?"
"Only a half-trained one, my lord. I left before my final initiation."
"Ah, yes. We must discuss the reason for that sometime. Just at present, though, it would interest me even more to hear something about your adventures in the White Hills with Torisen."
"Please, my lord. I can't discuss that."
"Has he bound you to silence?"
"N-no. That wasn't necessary. Oh, you don't understand. You can't!"
Ardeth leaned back and steepled his long white fingers. "I think I can . . . in part. Torisen is more your natural lord than I am. He is also, despite his antipathy to the Shanir, a very attractive man."
Kindrie rose abruptly. "My lord, I am grateful for the protection you have extended to me these past few days and sorry to give you such a poor return for it. I will remain in your camp tonight if I may and look for a new place tomorrow."
Ardeth sighed. "My, how stiff and stilted. Wait a moment, dear boy, please. This is too serious a matter to bury under a cartload of compliments. Something happened to Torisen in the White Hills. As far as I can determine, he's barely slept since, and not at all since the Grimly Holt. Now we're only five days away from the Cataracts. If I don't know what happened to him, I can't help him; and I think he does need help. Desperately."
Kindrie wavered. Then, "I'm sorry," he said. "It would be too much like betraying a confidence, and we Shanir can keep faith, whatever some people might think."
Ardeth's bland expression didn't change, but something flashed in the depths of his blue eyes that made the young man go back a step. "I never doubted it. You know, dear boy, it's a pity you were born into a Shanir-hating house like Randir's, especially with that white hair. Other Shanir traits are so much less noticeable; but then in some houses the hair wouldn't present much of a problem either. Mine was stained a fairly handsome shade of brown from the day it first grew until my ninetieth birthday."
Kindrie stared at him. He stepped back to the table and sat down as if someone had hit him behind the knees. "I should have known. Back in the Oseen Hills, where your mare smelled the burning post station and you knew what she'd smelled long before any of us possibly could have, I should have known."
"That was a slip," said Ardeth tranquilly, sipping his wine. "Luckily, only you seem to have caught it. Yes, I am indeed mind-bound to Brithany, my Whinno-hir. That and my hair seem to be my only Shanir traits except, of course, for the ability to bind men to me."
"But every Highborn can do that . . . can't he?"
"No. Actually only a few can. The lords must, of course, or they wouldn't be lords. What do you think holds the Kencyrath together?"
"I-I assumed it was the will of our god, although I remember that some Highborn used the blood-bond once."
"That was long ago, in a more trusting time. The blood-bond gave a Shanir lord almost complete control over his followers, body and soul. Usually, only Highborn were bound that way and then only under special circumstances. Then came the Fall. As far as I know, the Master wasn't a blood-binder; but he did abuse what Shanir power he had so spectacul
arly that afterward we of the Old Blood were made the scapegoats for all of our people's sins. But I hardly have to tell you that. As you well know, all the Shanir talents came under suspicion, even the beneficial ones. As for the blood-bond, no one would even have dared to mention it. So our ancestors fell back on the milder psychic bond that had always been used to bind the Kendar. What they don't seem to have realized is that even that bond can only be made by a Highborn with at least some trace of the Old Blood—in other words, by a Shanir."
"Why, the hypocrites." Kindrie thought of Randir and Caineron, of all the Highborn who had made his life miserable by sneering at his Shanir blood. "The lying hypocrites . . ."
Lying? That word brought him up short.
"No," said Ardeth gently. "The other lords simply don't understand. If you asked any of them if they were Shanir, they would thunder back, 'No!' And as far as they know, they'd be telling the truth. Ignorance goes a long way toward protecting honor."
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