by Tom Deitz
More rustling, then a loud meow. “Cat! Damned cat,” she heard the now-unseen guardsman growl in a scratchy tenor that hinted of an autumn cold. As if to confirm that assessment, he sneezed.
And seemed to be going away—until he suddenly turned again and marched back to the maze’s entrance, not a quarter span behind Tyrill’s back. Her heart double-beat, then seemed to stop entirely as she waited, trying to free her blowgun silently only to discover that it was stuck. At least if they killed him—if they could kill him—he had reached a place where it would be easy to hide the body.
What was he doing, anyway? And then she knew. Fabric scraped, mail jingled, leather hissed, and then more fabric; followed by the sound of liquid striking the foliage behind her with considerable force, accompanied by a low, relieved sigh. Her eyes went wide and Ilfon’s wider as fear warred with amusement on both their faces.
And then over.
… rustle, rustle, rustle …
That damned cat again, and closer. If only the lad would ignore it and go on his way. Smith-Hold’s cats were no concern of his.
Once again Tyrill’s luck held.
And then came the unthinkable.
She sneezed.
She tried desperately to make it a little cat sneeze. But it came on her so suddenly that it rushed out with full human noise and splendor.
“Who’s there?” The guard again, with his trews done up and no nonsense at all in his voice.
And then, impossibly, another sneeze.
Tyrill fumbled for her blowgun, but it had lodged between her cuff and the lining of her sleeve. For his part, Ilfon was so alarmed that he was simply staring—only for a breath, granted, but a breath was all it took for a young man to dash into the maze, look first right, then left, and see, however dimly, that he faced, to all appearances, a Common Clan crone and—possibly—her one-son.
At least that would have been the likeliest assessment had Ilfon not that moment managed to free his blowgun—exactly as Tyrill likewise untangled hers from her sleeve—neither with time to load them.
When Fate played games, it appeared, Fate played extravagantly.
“I don’t know who you are,” the guardsman snapped, leveling his sword at the two of them, while maneuvering himself in such a way that he neatly boxed them into the corner. “What I do know is that there’s no way on Angen that you two are flute players, or that those are flutes. In fact, you’re”—he stepped closer—recklessly, but it caught them both off guard—and flipped back the edge of Tyrill’s hood—“Lady Tyrill. And you—”
Ilfon acted. He heaved himself forward toward the guard, but Fate still had one cruel trick to play and had let a twig in the hedge snare Ilfon’s tunic, so that as he leapt forward, it yanked him back again. Which was all it took for the guard to whirl around and slam the flat of his sword into Ilfon’s ribs.
“Lady, you will come with me,” the guardsman growled. “As for you—” He scowled at Ilfon anxiously, then, with casual, calculated precision, swung his sword’s point delicately across the juncture of Ilfon’s calf and ankle. Tyrill heard the tendon snap and Ilfon’s hiss of pain and anger as blood spurted out upon the green.
“You won’t die,” the guardsman told him with calm dispassion. “But I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere, either—not before I can get this one in chains and return with reinforcements.”
Tyrill said nothing at all. There was nothing left to say. Which left it to Ilfon to lie on the ground and bleed, sweat, and try very hard neither to cry nor swear.
CHAPTER XXIX:
CHOICES
(WEST OF ERON–NEAR-AUTUMN: DAY II–MIDAFTERNOON)
“Dammit, I need to be there!” Vorinn growled. He was pacing up and down the riverbank, precisely at the juncture where rounded stones gave way to sandbar—stones that he kicked often as not, oblivious to what such useless violence did to his boots. Sand, he simply ignored. It was a beautiful place—or would have been had he not needed to be somewhere else. Lykkon walked beside him, along with Myx and Riff—and for some odd reason, that wretched birkit. What did they mean, anyway, letting something that wild travel with them like a pet?
As if hearing his thought, the beast bared its teeth at him, growled, and danced away.
“We don’t even know if Avall made it there,” he told Lykkon. “All we know is that he isn’t here. That none of them are.”
“He has to be there,” Lykkon retorted quickly. “There’s no reason to assume otherwise, given the way you got here.”
Vorinn rounded on him, fighting down a rage he certainly had a right to feel, though not to direct at Lykkon—or any man he liked or had soldiered with. “Yes, but assuming he is there, he’s fighting my fight and probably getting himself killed for his trouble.”
“It was his fight before it was your fight,” Lykkon replied calmly. “And he’s got better weapons than you had and a lesser foe. The Lightning Sword is the thing the Ninth Face fears most, which is why they were out to get it. Well, they’ve got it now, and from what you’ve said, they’ve got it in a way they can’t oppose. They gambled, and they lost.”
“That’s not why you care, though, is it?” That had come, uncharacteristically, from quiet Riff.
Vorinn stopped in place and glared at the younger man. “What are you saying?”
Riff stepped up to him bravely. “What everyone in camp has been thinking since you returned to Tir-Eron: that you want to be King, and would probably make a damned fine one; but that you’re too good a man to take the crown from your sister’s husband unless you win it fairly.”
Vorinn’s breath caught. “Do you believe that? Not about me being a good man; I’m not so vain as to need to probe that notion. But about people thinking I would make a good King?”
“I do believe it, if that helps. Avall believes it, for that matter, as, I’m sure, does Rann. And I will tell you this absolutely: While Avall was here, he was far, far happier than I ever saw him in Tir-Eron. Maybe not as happy as when he’s smithing, but I didn’t know him before he got all tangled up with the gems and the war. He doesn’t want to be King, but he thinks he’s required to be King, anyway, so he’s making the best go of it he can.”
“Which is why he sent the regalia away to start with,” Lykkon put in. “Oh, true, he knew it was a temptation to anyone interested in power—an example of which we’ve just witnessed. But he wanted it gone a lot more because it was one of the things that had made him King to start with. Anyone who has that much power—explicit or implicit—people expect you to use it, and as many will try to foist it on you as will try to take it away. Gynn might have been the King of Balance, but Avall values balance even more than Gynn did. You, however—this is going to sound strange coming from me, since I tend to analyze everything—but you’d be a good King simply because you’d be a good King. You want the job, and you’ve got the right allies and the kind of skills we need right now. Avall’s both too soft and too hard.”
“And,” Riff finished for him, “that could kill him—and the artist in all of us knows that would be a crime.”
Vorinn cocked a brow. “So you’re saying …”
“That Avall should do what he’s good at, and so should you.”
Vorinn paused, staring at the river. “It’s probably over by now, anyway.”
Myx shrugged and lifted a brow. “Might not be.”
“And how to you propose that I return to Gem-Hold, when I don’t even know how I got here?”
Lykkon chuckled softly and laid an arm across Vorinn’s wide shoulders, drawing him back toward what was rapidly becoming a proper, if impromptu, camp. “That should be obvious.”
“Not to me!” Vorinn grumbled. “I know it has to do with the gems, but that’s all. When I came here, I was just trying to get the sword away from Zeff.”
“That sword’s still here, and all the power it contains.”
“You’re saying that I could—”
“I’m saying that you might be able to. It
makes sense to me, and I know a fair bit about those things. To jump apparently requires three things. It takes a gem, preferably a big one that likes you, but apparently a bunch of small ones will do just as well; it takes blood to wake it and usually warm bodies around to power it; and it takes will. We’ve got all of those things. As far as I can tell, all you have to do is blood yourself on the hilt and wish. And something tells me you’ll have no trouble with the wishing.”
“What about the rest of you?”
Lykkon folded his arms and frowned, kicking at a stone. “I don’t know. We could add our wills, but that might also cause problems, since one of us might want something else more than you wanted to get back to Gem-Hold. Or one of us might think we wanted one thing and find we were really wanting another—like what probably brought you here.”
Vorinn regarded him incredulously. “I already knew you were brilliant, Lykkon. But I never knew how much so. Whatever happens—if I survive, and whether or not I become King—there’ll always be a place for you where I am.”
Lykkon grinned, and Vorinn remembered all over that the lad was still only nineteen. For another few eights, at least.
By which time they had reached the camp. Strynn looked up at him from where she was calmly drinking dilute cauf with Div while studying what had been Zeff’s sword. “Not bad work here,” she announced, “though the edge could be a lot better. The gems … they’re small, but I can feel the power in them. They’re probably tuned to Zeff, but I’ve no doubt you could master them, since they seem to like me, and I’m blood kin to you. If you’re lucky, they won’t even contain a death, which seems to be the worst thing that can happen to gems—and even that can be cured.”
Vorinn stared at her. “You’re all like this, aren’t you? Eaten up with the wonder of those damned things.”
“It’s a matter of survival,” Strynn replied with a wary smile. And with that she laid the blade across her forearm and extended the blade, hilt first, to her brother. “You want to go; you need to go; I think you probably have to go—and now you’ve got a way to go. There’s nothing else I can tell you.”
Vorinn chose to ignore the weapon for the nonce. “What about the rest of you? I can’t in good conscience leave you, but if you go—” He glanced at those gathered around: Strynn, Div, Riff, Myx, Lykkon, Bingg—and poor tortured Krynneth and blind Kylin. “Some of you aren’t soldiers,” he finished roughly.
“Soldier enough to save Avall,” Myx retorted, looking at Kylin, who was saying nothing at all. Krynneth’s eyes were as hard as Vorinn’s last words had been. “Soldiering doesn’t always mean swinging a sword.”
“In any case,” Strynn continued, “it’s everyone’s free choice. We’re not in Eron, by any reasonable definition, so Eronese law doesn’t hold, save as we acknowledge it. And even if it did, I’m Queen by implication and Consort in all but fact, and that gives me power to decide such things in the absence of the King. Nor are you King yet, oh my brother.”
“But you. I can’t leave you here—but you—you can’t stay here unprotected! You’re—”
“Actually very wise to stay here,” Strynn replied tartly. “There hasn’t been time to tell you, thanks to your unorthodox entry and apparently hasty exit, but I now bear Avall’s heir—heirs, actually, since I think they’re going to be twins.”
Vorinn’s tense expression broke into a grin. “Twins! Does … does Avall know?”
“Of course.”
Vorinn shook his head. “Yes, naturally he does. It’s just that there are so many things these days that people don’t know—”
Strynn regarded him levelly. “Yes, I know.” A deep breath, then: “Brother, there’s something else you don’t know and probably need to know. It’s something so new in my thinking—in our thinking, actually—that sometimes I hardly know it myself.”
“Go on.”
Another breath. Strynn’s gaze swept around those assembled there as if seeking permission to speak further, then met his gaze again. “You brought it up all unknowing, so I might as well finish it,” she began, then paused again and went on, with obvious difficulty. “I really am thinking of staying here more or less permanently. We all are, actually—once all this is settled.”
“You’re mad!”
Strynn raised a hand to silence him, in a gesture Vorinn knew better than to challenge. “No, hear me! The men started it first, mostly as a function of practical speculation when they thought they were stranded here—an eight south of here, to be precise. I’m not talking about anything as major as a craft-hold or anything,” she went on quickly. “In fact, I wouldn’t want that. But that’s getting off what needs to be our focus here. To return to where we were, we’ve found—and this surprises me as much as anyone, let me tell you—we’ve found that we—none of us—are happy with all the rules and rites and responsibilities that come with living in Eron. We think—think, mind you—that we could get by here without a lot of them, still have a decent life, and all be a whole lot happier.”
Vorinn could restrain himself no longer. “Who,” he snapped, “is we?”
Strynn’s voice remained calm, though she frowned ever so slightly. “Basically everyone who was here when you arrived, with some qualifications. No one would have to stay,” she stressed. “But everyone who was here is warm to the idea in theory—and yes, that includes Avall. Myx and Riff, in particular, like the idea, and think their consorts would like it as well. We’d have to work hard, of course—much harder than we might be used to—but we’ve all got a solid grounding in basic survival skills, and we could recruit people—carefully—from Eron, though no more than twenty or so, I think.”
“Why carefully?”
“Because we wouldn’t want anyone to know we were here, not least because people might—rightly or wrongly—try to link us to the Lightning Sword and come seeking it, which could ruin everything.”
Vorinn’s frown deepened. “So Avall hasn’t changed his thinking about that?”
Strynn shook her head. “Only in the short term. But I can’t imagine him changing it in the long term, either, since any plan to retain it in Tir-Eron would simply put him back where he was—a miserably unhappy man cut off by circumstance from pursuing what he does best and loves most.”
“Sister, do you know what you’re saying?”
“I think I do,” Strynn replied carefully. “Let me stress that this is new thinking—dreaming around the campfire kind of stuff. But it would solve so many of our current problems. In fact, the only problem it would really create beyond the obvious is how we would resolve our ingrained sense of responsibility with this. But Merryn has the most trouble with that idea—and she’s warming to it herself, if for no other reason because she thinks she has to protect me and her brother.”
“But—”
“This wouldn’t be exile, Vorinn. We would still visit Eron when and if we wanted to and needed to. We’ve our own fortunes to finance a lot of this, and no lack of contacts—if they live—who would help us, surreptitiously, with supplies and such. We—”
“What about Averryn?”
“What about him? He’s in very good hands, from everything I’ve heard. And there’s no reason those hands—or others like them—can’t bring Averryn here.”
Vorinn regarded her incredulously. “You really do mean it! You’re going to stay here.”
“Maybe. If enough other folks agree to stay—or join us—to assure a reasonable life. Rest assured, brother, I’m far too spoiled and selfish—and far, far too much a hedonist—to want to spend the rest of my life foraging for food. But it would only take a few people with the right skills to set up a decently functional hold. And very little time—for the simple reason that the winters won’t be as bad over here.”
“You know this?”
“Lykkon all but knows it, and I’m willing to trust him.”
Vorinn exhaled heavily and stared at the sky as if daring the day to progress. “Fair enough, then, I’ll say it simply: I hav
e no choice but to return to the war as soon as I can, assuming I can get there, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. Anyone who wants to accompany me is free to do so, but should be aware that we may not get there at all, or that the mere fact of that person’s presence may render return impossible—” He looked at Lykkon when he said that. “Am I right? I think you’re all fools to consider staying over here, though I can see why some of you might think you can. But frankly, there’s no time to talk about any of that now. As for going back with me: I’ll need to hear how you stand—now, if you don’t mind.”
Strynn regarded him calmly. “I’ll stay here. I really have no choice, since I have no idea what jumping might do to my unborn children, and I will not put the heirs to two great clans into the kind of combat situation in which you may very well find yourself. I will remain in this place for two days, awaiting some kind of word, then return to the lake. Anyone who wants me can find me there.”
“I’m with her,” Div chimed in. “We’ve become good friends, and I know the Wild. I can teach everyone what they need to know, and I think I can do it without setting everyone at each other’s throats. The birkit also seems to like me, and birkits make far better allies than foes.”
“Myx?”
Myx exchanged glances with Riff. “I’d like to stay here at least until Strynn and Div get settled and there are more men about. Not that I doubt the women’s strength or skill, but there are things at which men are simply better. I’ve also got some healing skill, and Riff’s good with wood. Though I’ve no right to speak for him,” he finished awkwardly.
“Riff?”
“What Myx said, to which I’ll add that this was never my war, and I thought it was stupid from first to last—which doesn’t mean I don’t think highly of those who had to fight it, or understand their motivations. But sometimes—I guess I’m saying that sometimes you need to forget about ideals and focus on facts. Survival’s a fact. Making things is a fact. Who runs a kingdom for what reason—that doesn’t matter.”
