The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy

by Mercedes Lackey

  “He went on to Stonehearth to warn them, and left Cilarnen there. And that would have been the end of the matter, except for the fact that some moonturns later, a Centaur Wildmage named Kardus received a Task—”

  “A Centaur Wildmage?” Kellen asked. “But Centaurs can’t do magic.”

  “Who’s telling this story?” Shalkan demanded “Kardus’s Task—a Mageprice to anyone else—was to go to Stonehearth and help the human boy he found there. He arrived at the same time that a part of the Centaur levy was mustering there, preparing to head over the Border. Well, one of Them showed up, mistook Cilarnen for you—so Cilarnen says—and tried to destroy the village to cover up Its mistake. Kardus, Cilarnen, and Wirance—a High Reaches Wildmage—working together, managed to kill It, but the levy took heavy losses and so did the village. Cilarnen decided he had to come and talk to you, and since Kardus’s Task was to help Cilarnen, along they came with what was left of the Centaur levy. Which is all anybody knows. Except that he’s definitely not a Wildmage, and he does have magic.”

  Once again Kellen was impressed at how much Shalkan managed to find out—though the unicorn certainly couldn’t be sneaking around the main camp picking up gossip. He couldn’t imagine how Shalkan did it. Or did everyone come to him to tell him the news?

  All it did was add to the mystery.

  “Why me?” Kellen asked.

  “Do come back and tell us,” Shalkan said archly. “And now, I suspect everyone—including Redhelwar—would like an answer to that question.”

  Reminded of his other responsibilities, Kellen quickly finished his tea and bid farewell to the Unicorn Knights, mounted Firareth again, and rode down into the main camp.

  Seeing Gesade again had made him feel better. He hadn’t thought it would—he’d thought being reminded of his failure would make him feel terrible—but somehow it didn’t. Her refusal to wallow in self-pity, even after her maiming, reminded him that no matter how terrible the loss, there was always something left with which to begin anew.

  WHEN he reached the horse-lines there was a message waiting for him to report to Redhelwar “at his convenience.” Kellen grinned to himself and turned Firareth over to one of the ostlers for untacking, brushing down, and turning out He’d dawdled long enough.

  He presented himself at Redhelwar’s pavilion, relieved to see only familiar faces there: Redhelwar, Adaerion, and Idalia. He bowed.

  Redhelwar regarded him with a lifted brow. “Idalia has told me of your sortie into the caverns, and what you found—or, rather, did not find—there, and Adaerion has acquainted me with your suggestion that the Lady Vestakia attempt to communicate with the Crystal Spiders. Perhaps there is something that you will wish to add to that which they have told.”

  “I am sure they have told you everything that I would have said,” Kellen said. “All I have to tell that they do not know is that I have seen Gesade, and that she is well and in good spirits. I ask that you forgive my tardiness, but … I wished to know how she was,” he added awkwardly.

  It could have been viewed as manipulation of the most blatant sort to offer up that excuse for his lateness, but Redhelwar had once been a Unicorn Knight himself, and Kellen knew he would understand. Besides, it was no more than the truth.

  Redhelwar’s expression softened. “You did all you could for her, Kellen.”

  Kellen grinned. “And so she told me—very firmly. And since the unicorns know all the gossip, I think I know as much as anyone does about our … guest.”

  “Guest.” The word tasted sour, tarnishing his good humor.

  “And what we know of him certainly doesn’t add up to a logical whole,” Idalia said. “He’s used magic—everyone agrees about that. But when a Mage is Banished, they Burn the Gift from his mind before they cast him out, so he’ll have no chance at all against the Scouring Hunt. They must have done that to you, Kellen,” she finished, her voice puzzled.

  “No,” Kellen said. “But then, I wasn’t even a Student Apprentice. I was the worst student in the entire history of the Mage-College; I could barely light a fire—or so everyone assumed. I did know a couple of First Level spells—I wasn’t supposed to—but as far as anyone knew, I hardly had the Gift at all. I think I’ve forgotten them now.” He thought hard. “I suppose Lycaelon was supposed to do it when he came to see me anyway, just in case—but I made him so furious I guess he just forgot.”

  Dredging up those old memories required an act of will, and Kellen was surprised at how much they hurt.

  “Lycaelon was a great one for forgetting things,” Idalia said caustically. “And when you were Banished, the Boundaries were so vast that there shouldn’t have been any way for you to get across them before the Hunt caught up to you even if you’d had an intact Gift—in fact, even with Shalkan’s help, you didn’t manage it. If you hadn’t been a Knight-Mage-to-be, you’d be dead.”

  “But Cilarnen was a good student,” Kellen said resentfully. “He’d already been a Student Apprentice forever, and that was last spring. They’d certainly have Burned him.”

  “But they didn’t,” Idalia said. “He’s cast Fire, Mage-light, and Mageshield, from what the Centaurs say. The first two are also spells of the Wild Magic—don’t look so surprised, Kellen; an awful lot of magic comes from the same root, and the High Magick has to have come from the Wild Magic originally—but I can’t cast anything like Mageshield.”

  “Well, neither can I,” Kellen said sulkily, well and truly irritated now. It was a simple spell, too, a First Level spell, one that a Student Apprentice had to master for his own safety before moving on to more elaborate and dangerous work. Most of the First Level spells didn’t even require wand and sigil work, just visualizations and cantrips …

  But he’d never managed to learn them.

  He shook his head, disgusted with himself. It was sickening how quickly all that dead-numbing rote memorization came flooding back into his mind. As if he’d never left the City at all. As if he were still trapped within its walls, buried alive.

  And he’d had a chance to think about this—an Armethaliehan Mage, arriving here at this time, this place—and he didn’t like the conclusions he had come to.

  IDALIA watched her brother with carefully-concealed dismay. It was as if the past half-year had suddenly been stripped away. This was the “old” Kellen; the boy she’d first met—unhappy, uncertain, angry.

  If Kellen had a weak point, it was Armethalieh. He hated and loved it at the same time—she was positive even he wasn’t sure which. The same way he—still—hated and loved Lycaelon, though—and she was quite positive of this—he’d convinced himself he didn’t care about his father at all. And since Lycaelon was Arch-Mage of Armethalieh, Father and City were very nearly the same thing. Certainly Lycaelon had always thought so.

  She knew nothing about Cilarnen Volpiril, except that his father was Lycaelon’s rival on the High Council, but from what Kellen said about him, it was obvious that Kellen saw Cilarnen as everything he had never succeeded in being: excellent student, beloved son.

  And now Cilarnen was here, reminding him of every failure, every fault.

  And Kellen wasn’t thinking clearly at all.

  “Well, as a Knight-Mage, you have precious little use for Mageshield, now, do you?” Idalia said, trying to draw him back to the present and make him focus on what he did have.

  Kellen looked at her, startled. “I … suppose not,” he said, slowly.

  “It would be good to know just why he was Banished from the City,” Idalia continued ruthlessly.

  “That is something he has told no one,” Adaerion said. “And we do not know enough of the ways of the human city to know for what cause it casts out its folk.”

  Kellen looked at Idalia. She was relieved to see that he seemed to have come back to himself a bit.

  “You and I were Banished for studying the Wild Magic,” he said hesitantly. “But … they would have let me stay if I’d apologized and given it up.”

  “We
ll, we can rule out studying the Wild Magic,” Idalia said. “Because we know he hasn’t done that.” She frowned. “There’s hardly anything else the Mages Banish someone for. For any other crime, you either do penance, pay a fine, get your memories excised, or all three.”

  “Idalia,” Kellen said after a moment’s silence, an odd note in his voice, “what is studying the Wild Magic? If you’re a High Mage? If someone has studied the Wild Magic, what actual crime—the name of the crime, I mean—are they committing against the City?”

  Idalia thought hard. It had been almost half her lifetime since she’d discovered her three Books in the Records Room of the Council Hall, and from the moment they’d come into her hands, she’d known she was committing …

  “Treason,” she said. “To study the Wild Magic is to commit treason and heresy against the Light.”

  “Ah,” said Redhelwar with satisfaction. “We progress.”

  “No,” said Kellen. “We don’t. We could talk until the sun came up and get nowhere,” he added harshly. “What we need to do is ask Cilarnen questions, not each other. So I’ll see him. I’ll question him. And if I don’t like his answers, I’ll kill him.”

  “Kellen!” Idalia gasped, stunned.

  “That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” Kellen said bleakly, and now Idalia could see the pain in his eyes—the pain of a man carrying a burden far too heavy for him to bear. “To kill things? We can discuss why he’s here and how he got here for as long as we like. But in the end, it comes down to one thing: a Wildmage brought Cilarnen to me, because that’s his Mageprice. I don’t think there was anything in that price about me letting him live.”

  Idalia would have liked to deny the truth in that—but in all honesty, she couldn’t.

  “I don’t know why an Armethaliehan Mage—whatever his rank, Banished for treason or not—is here. It doesn’t seem really likely that they’d let him go with his Gift intact, or when they knew an Elf was lurking around outside the City ready to help him escape the Scouring Hunt. It sounds like a trap to me. I’ll see,” Kellen finished simply.

  “And certainly there will be time enough for that on the morrow,” Redhelwar said, as smoothly as if Kellen had not just proposed to murder a guest under Elven protection. “Tonight, I believe he still recovers from his ordeal in the blizzard—I know not where. For yourself, Kellen, I am certain a warm bath, a hot meal, and a good night’s sleep will be welcome before you are called upon to try this stranger’s motives. The tea that can be brewed in the caverns, so I am assured by Adaerion, is foul, and you will wish for better. Belepheriel has made you a gift of some of the Armethaliehan Black that you favor; I shall send Dionan to your pavilion to brew it for you after you have bathed, and see you to your rest.”

  For a moment Idalia thought Kellen would object, but he caught himself in time. He bowed, deeply.

  “You do me too much honor, Redhelwar. It is cold in the caverns, and colder without. It will be good to spend the night in reflection, and I will welcome the tea.”

  He bowed again—to Redhelwar, to Adaerion, to Idalia, and left quietly.

  There was silence in Redhelwar’s pavilion for a time.

  Someone please tell me that Kellen didn’t just suggest killing Cilarnen, Idalia thought.

  “If the Mageborn boy is indeed a threat …” Adaerion began.

  “Then Kellen will deal appropriately with him in the morning,” Redhelwar said. “I trust him to do as the Wild Magic wills.”

  But not, I notice, enough that you were willing to let him know where Cilarnen is now, Idalia thought.

  Bowing, she took her own leave.

  HE was sure Redhelwar was right. He thought he was sure.

  Actually, he wasn’t sure of anything other than that he was cold, hungry, and tired.

  But a hot bath and fresh clothes—he’d spent the last sennight living in his armor, and it was certainly time for a change—did much to make Kellen feel better, as did a hot fresh meal that hadn’t started life as blocks of journey-food. After that he returned to his tent—where Dionan was waiting to brew the promised tea—and drank the entire pot, while giving his armor and sword a thorough cleaning.

  It made him feel better—as long as he didn’t think about Cilarnen.

  The uppermost emotion in Kellen’s mind—he was honest enough to admit—was outrage. How dare Cilarnen come here? This was Kellen’s place, Kellen’s life—he’d worked hard to make a place for himself here, and now Cilarnen was coming to—

  Take it all away? Is that what you really think?

  Kellen snorted, surprised, disgusted, and amused—all at the same time—by the direction of his own thoughts. Even if Cilarnen were a fully invested High Mage with an army at his back—which he wasn’t—he couldn’t do that. But what if he ISN’T Cilarnen at all? What if he’s a Demon who’s figured out some way to pass the bounds of the Elven Lands?

  And conceal himself from Vestakia? Unlikely, but possible.

  What was slightly more possible was that he was some other kind of enemy. Something Vestakia couldn’t sense, something that could pass the bounds of the Elven Lands, but an enemy nonetheless.

  If he’s an enemy, I’ll deal with him.

  But you have to deal with yourself first, a small inner voice said.

  Kellen sighed, and set his sword and armor aside—both gleamed with oil and polish—and sat down cross-legged on his sleeping mat. He sat quietly, not emptying his mind but letting it fill with whatever it chose.

  His losses came first. Ciltesse. Petariel. The dead friends he had not yet had time to mourn in the need to cleanse the caverns of duergar. The lost members of his thirty, replaced already by near-strangers who had not yet had time to become friends. He was afraid to get to know them well, afraid to lose them too.

  Elves were supposed to live for centuries. There were Elves in Sentarshadeen as old as Armethalieh! They were supposed to be living in peace in their beautiful cities, studying, crafting, making life itself into an art. They weren’t supposed to die—drowning in their own blood, spilling their guts out on the snow, vomiting and convulsing as they died of Shadowed Elf poison …

  Screaming as they were eaten by acid.

  They weren’t supposed to die.

  But they do die, Kellen told himself. They die so their children will live. They die so the Centaurs will live. They die so the trees will live.

  He remembered the barren wasteland he and Jermayan had ridden through on their way to the Black Cairn—the land that, so Jermayan, had told him, had been a lush and fruitful forest before the last time Shadow Mountain had gone to war.

  Yes, they fight because of that.

  If there had to be war, that was a good reason to fight. Because to see the whole world turned into that—and worse—was unthinkable. Anything his friends had to do to stop it was worth it.

  Even die.

  But Gods of the Wild Magic, he would miss them—!

  He let his grief wash over him, and through him, and when its first violence was past, he looked deeper.

  Hatred. Anger. Fear. They came racing into his consciousness like coldwarg over the snow, all centered on the image of a young man he remembered only dimly.

  Envy. Spite. Malice. He hoped that Cilarnen had suffered every step of his journey here, had loathed falling into the hands of the “Lesser Races,” had been terrified of the Elves.

  Grief. Despair. He hoped, when Cilarnen had heard the gate slam shut behind him—he’d realized his high-and-mighty father had betrayed and abandoned him—he’d realized that the High Mages cared for nothing but power, for nothing but themselves. That everything he’d done every day of his life to excel, to please, had come to nothing in the end.

  Kellen realized he was crying silently, tears streaming down his face.

  Is that it? he thought wonderingly, even as his heart ached with loss and despair. But I don’t care—

  Apparently he did.

  “I don’t,” he whispered aloud, wiping at h
is eyes. He had everything here—friends, a life, work that mattered, a gift to cherish and train.

  But the thought of Cilarnen coming here … frightened him.

  Because Cilarnen was—or had been, at least—everything that Kellen had once desperately wanted to be. And it was as if …

  As if I’m afraid that if when I see him again, everything will go back to being that way. I’ll be Kellen-the-failure again, and he’ll still be … perfect.

  It was a ridiculous thing to fear. In Armethalieh, Cilarnen had belonged, and Kellen had been out-of-place. Here, Kellen fit in.

  Only he didn’t. Not really. He was a Knight-Mage. Knight-Mages didn’t “fit in.”

  There.

  That was the root of his anger and fear.

  He didn’t fit in here either. He was just as alone here as he had been in the City.

  Kellen bit back a heartfelt sob.

  Oh, it was a completely different situation, of course. In Armethalieh, conformity was the highest goal. Here, everyone valued him for being different. His Knight-Mage gifts were esteemed and honored.

  But he was still different. Set apart. In a way that even Idalia wasn’t.

  And now, if Cilarnen came and fit in …

  You’ll be jealous. You’ll still be jealous. Of him.

  Kellen managed a shaky laugh and wiped his face dry once more.

  But he thought he’d worked his way to the heart of the problem. It had been as painful as lancing an infected boil, but he felt better now. And he thought that tomorrow, when he faced Cilarnen, he could judge him fairly—for whatever he was.

  I won’t like it. I won’t like HIM. But I can do it.

  Thoroughly exhausted now, Kellen rolled into his bedclothes and doused the lanterns with a gesture.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Shadows of the Past

  COLD AIR AND a hint of movement woke him. Kellen rolled out of his bedclothes and grabbed his sword in one fluid movement. Someone was moving toward him. He reached out and grabbed the front of the intruder’s tunic, flinging him to the bedroll he’d just vacated, the edge of his sword at the shadowy figure’s throat.