I: Courting Trouble

  “You what?”

  Thunder rumbled in the king’s voice. The plaintiff, an ordinarily sturdy farmer, broke and cowered. “I never thought ony harm on’t!”

  Deorgard stared at the kneeling man. The entire court stared, and then as one looked at the man’s wife, standing behind and the infant in her arms. Where did you think children came from? Raian burned to ask.

  The defendant was next to be speared on the king’s glance. “’T is nowt to do wi’ me!” he gibbered again. “His the cow, his the calf, aye?” Minutely, Raian shook his head.

  Jaga Spearfence was a plain man of middle years; his wife, Henlaf, young and comely, as was his neighbor Haldebrad, the defendant. For three years Jaga had turned a blind eye to their trysting—on the grounds, he said, that she was always home when he wanted her.

  Now there was this child, for whom both men disowned responsibility but came to court to oblige the other to do his duty by it. A strange suit; any other man present would have been fighting to claim it as his own—and might yet, if the principals were to be such fools. The silence in Deorgard’s hall spread till one could almost hear the smoke curling from the hearth-fire.

  Raian, sitting as always at Deorgard’s right foot as a showpiece, ‘my imperial slave boy’, did not see his master shift, but he felt it and dodged. Deorgard lunged. A guttural roar burst from him as he seized plaintiff and defendant each by the sherte front and cracked their skulls together. Together he flung them back and as they scrabbled in the rushes, stood and reared one great foot for a majestic swing.

  The husband found his own feet and bolted for the doors; the neighbor skidded, fell on his chin, and the royal boot on his rising backside propelled him another yard back onto his chin. As the court howled with laughter the trembling man escaped at last. The woman melted out after them.

  Deorgard shook his fists after them with another inarticulate roar, and Bradgith thumped the ruld weara to close court only just before the king stormed from it. Raian leaped and flung his master’s great cloak of two full bearskins to his back only just in time himself.

  He paused then, watching the king stomp out into the snowy world’s white-gold glare. Then he stared at his hands, that had thrown the cloak. He knew he was growing—this was his second pair of boots since he had come here to Angowin last fall. And he still had thrown the cloak upward, to gain the king’s shoulders—but not so far as seemed right. Come to think of it, he could just about look Wolf in the eye now. On that thought, he snatched up his own cloak and dashed from the hall.

  He found Wolf at Maglad’s town house, carefully closing his own master’s door after admitting king and bard. Raian tackled him back into the snowdrifts beside the porch. Wolf fought back only enough to keep his face clear.

  “Ach! Hey, boyo, we get enough of that tonight!”

  “Is there ever enough?” Raian retorted gaily. Still, he flung himself back and gave a hand to pull Wolf to his feet.

  “Maybe not,” Wolf grinned, flinging a fistful of snow into Raian’s face. “Where’s our teacher-boy?”

  “Scrubbing.”

  “Wasting our time! Let’s go get him, then! They’ll be hours,” he added, cocking his head at the door.

  “Yah. What I wouldn’t give to be in there with them!”

  “Yah, how will they ever know what great strategies they’re overlooking, leaving you out!” Wolf braced for the assault that always followed remarks like this, but Raian only tapped his shoulder.

  Sure of Wolf’s full attention, Raian walked gently into him face-first—and the tip of Raian’s nose crossed above Wolf’s. He grinned.

  “I can fix that!” Wolf yelled, grabbing for Raian’s face, and they laughed, rolled and tumbled through frozen mud and the snow all the way back to Deorgard’s house where Sorchone cleaned the breakfast pots. They lent their own hands to the work, the sooner to be done with it, and hustled him out, out beyond the village wall to their secret training ground. Sorchone, they had discovered, knew some very interesting fighting tricks, and they needed them.

  Winterbound, the Geillan men livened the dark evenings with contests of strength and skill. Clearing space in the king’s great hall after the day meal, they drank till late in the night and threw knives, hurled axes, and wrestled, wrangled and fought amid extravagant betting. For comedy, they often pitted thrall against thrall. And, as Raian and Wolf both quickly learned, slaves who fought well and won often rose in the rankings like any other victor. Most of their opponents now were freemen.

  Their street-fighting skills had won fat purses for their early backers, but it was Sorchone who was making local heroes of them. Sorchone himself invariably lost till no one now bothered with him at all. Raian alone noticed that, lose how he would, he nevertheless emerged unscathed, bruiseless and whole. Confronted, Sorchone bought their silence by teaching them to win with the devices he used for losing.

  Today as they walked back together, breathless and exhilarated after their training, Raian asked again why Sorchone always threw his fights. The young Sferan stared thoughtfully into the snow-laden woods before replying with a question of his own. “Do you like being a slave?” When they glared their answer, he shrugged. “But when you win, you please your masters. Do you wish them to be pleased?”

  Raian frowned. It was true; Deorgard and Maglad both reveled in the success of their two thralls, and gifted them handsomely. The Geillari regarded the prowess of a man, be he enemy, thrall, or vassal, as a sign of the still greater power of the one who mastered him.

  “I don’t care if they’re pleased or not,” he said at last. “It’s a waste of my time, to lose.”

  Wolf beamed at Raian like a farmer at a prizewinning chick, then at Sorchone to make sure he appreciated this elegant wisdom. Sorchone conceded with a nod, but said no more.

  “Where did you learn all this, anyway?” Raian demanded, forgetting that his earlier question had not been answered at all.

  “At home,” Sorchone said simply, and truthfully enough. “From the time I could walk,” he added, again truthfully if allowed now to refer to the Cathforrow family practices and not the Order’s.

  “Some family,” grunted Wolf, interpreting this as intended. Raian eyed Sorchone suspiciously, but he offered no details and they did not press for any.

  He walked them back to Maglad’s house and left them speculating on exactly how the Madroch would tackle the northern clans come spring and whether those clans would be prescient enough—“Enough to tell the sun’s gonna rise!” Wolf snorted—to prepare against him. Then he excused himself, Raian having no tasks for him, and retired to the royal barn.

  Here he cast about for observers and, finding none, climbed up into his meditation hole. The sweet musty hay blanketed him around and kept him warm enough to sit motionless for all of a bitter night, let alone a half-hour of solitude. Weariness weighed on him that had nothing to do with his slave’s labors or training duties. For a long time he simply lay back and stared unseeing into the dim rafters.

  He was, he thought, executing his Challenge poorly. He knew more devices for good cheer and tranquility than he did for combat; his gloomy dismay was therefore of his own permission if not his devising, and, therefore, doubly damning. Why could he not seem to get a grip on himself?

  No one here explained interesting nuances of the soul to him; no one cleared a fug of frustration by being incongruously delighted that the student suffered at all (“Excellent!” Mistress Senna had once exulted, “You’re about to break through!”) He despaired of being dependent on such guidance, and pictured himself doddering and old and still seeking a Master to tell him what was going on behind his own face. The energy for a dry chuckle arose from somewhere, but not enough for sitting up to meditate.

  He missed Andrastir. He missed paved streets, and being able to set foot outdoors without setting it in mud. He missed high marble walls, and gardens with every bush’s twig trimmed to a poetry of line even when completely bare.

  He longed to see even one unfamiliar face. This village—Tilderuld; Sorchone grimaced, but with humor, at the Geillan name that translated almost perfectly as ‘Kingscroft’—the seat of a powerful warlord, held so few folk that not only could he count every one without estimation (two hundred and seven, as of last week’s funeral), he could name them all down to the latest babe; another three hundred and sixty-two (as of a birth a fortnight ago) lived in isolated farms in a three-mile radius and came in more or less weekly for market or business. Before winter set in, strangers, mostly Dunmadroch and Dun Heorbrann but some from subject kingdomlets, came to town by the tens.

  Tens. Sorchone shook his head at an owl dozing in the rafters above him, and sighed delicately, mourning the lost sport of watching thousands of strangers and trying to read in them something of their past, their lives, their business in the city. Seeing a face, not known but with a familial cast, felt like catching his fish: perhaps a scion of some renowned family, come in from a district of Andrastir so remote from the Ardassiann that it must seem to these Geillari of Tilderuld like another country. Or, if the slightly-familiar subject stared and gawked, perhaps a country cousin on his first civilized adventure.

  He missed being obliged, on a busy day, to change his clothes a dozen times or more: meeting a moneychanger in the forenoon demanded a very different dress than did meeting the same man for the same reason in the early evening. (He frowned in the gloom. His personal discovery, Tastag Laa, the Spindle Street tailor, must be feeling the loss of Sorchone’s custom sorely. He should have thought of that before he left; he was sure Heigar, Kingscroft’s Fashion-master, would have done so.) Ah, but here, a man might wear his same tunic all the year round, only adding or removing leggings and sleeves in deference to the seasons. The only way Sorchone would get a change of clothes here would be by destroying his current garments. He draped himself in his sleeping blanket in order to launder them.

  As for laundering himself, how he dreamed of hot baths! It was not that his unwitting hosts—they might think themselves his captors or masters, but he knew better, and that knowledge itself often depressed him further—did not bathe, or bathe often enough. The communal steam lodges were not for thralls, though, and his personal hygiene choices came down to a tepid bucket in a corner of the barn, or the river. Despite the deepening winter, he often chose the sheer lavish quantity of water about his person despite its iciness. This had buoyed his status, and led to a small outbreak of young bloods hot to prove themselves hardier than the puny Sferan thrall. That had amused him, briefly. Now he watched them from a remote bleakness, seeing through them to a marble pool of steaming scented water, his head nestled in an inflated bladder as he floated, motionless except for the gentle rhythmic bobbing as his lungs filled and emptied, abandoned by time. Sometimes as he watched the young toughs, he added floating petals to this inner vision.

  He sighed, curling deeper into the hay. When I get back to Andrastir, may I never set foot beyond its gates again! Then he froze, not stiff but every hair alert in now-instinctive dread. If his fellow Runedaur ever caught wind of any such weakness, they would make merry hell indeed. He shuddered, grinned wryly in the lonely dimness, and settled into his meditation.

  When he returned to Deorgard’s hall, Raian, busy sharpening knives, tossed him the sewing kit and a tunic of rough black wool. They worked close together near the door for light, silently though Raian fumed. Sorchone watched him over his mending, trying to read the wrath, but it was abruptly explained when the doorway darkened. Raian swore a soft oath involving the word again before looking up, schooled well to patience.

  The two men on the threshold gave a cursory glance into the hall, more to assure themselves of the king’s absence than to find him. They scrupulously asked after His Majesty’s likely return, and then came to their point.

  “Yes,” said Raian, his voice weighted with a weariness Sorchone alone heard, “I overheard His Majesty discussing your case.”

  They came from a village two leagues away and, like so many others, had yet to be heard in Deorgard’s all too brief, and infrequent, courts. And like a growing number of others, they had followed Rumor to the king’s body-slave who “might have heard sommat.” And he had, or so he said, and who was Sorchone to gainsay him?

  When Raian finished and the two petitioners had gone, he did venture, “Perhaps not quite fair to the younger one?”

  “And—?” Raian snapped, for he liked to be fair. But, “Fair!” he spat, not waiting for Sorchone to reply. “If they wanted ‘fair’, they could have stayed home and worked it out themselves. They don’t want for ‘fair’—they want for a king!”

  Sorchone’s eyebrows tried to reach his hairline. Deeply he breathed, stilling himself, but Raian did not notice, plunging back into his work with a throttled violence. He considered what he wanted to know and what would most likely bring it out, and with what effect in Raian. “What, then, should His Majesty discover your cuckolding him with his own people?”

  Sorchone beheld a ripple of fear, simple physical fear, adulterated as hoped by a boyish giggle at the sexual language. The fear won; interesting. Raian’s eyes flashed. “Who’s going to tell him?”

  Sorchone put up a placating hand. “I? These people are no concern of mine.” But you have made them yours, have you not? “And would His Majesty heed the tale of the slave of a slave? Yet he cannot go benighted forever.”

  “No,” Raian conceded, paling. Then he flushed and turned angrily back to his work. Sorchone caught a mutter very much like, “If he cared so much, he ought to do it himself!”

  In the ageless habit of the Runedaur, he remained attuned, acutely aware of Raian while using his task of stitchery to ‘get himself out of his own way’, as the sages put it. Thus Raian’s return to speech long minutes later did not surprise him—though its content did:

  “So, what would you have done? About the younger one, I mean.”

  In a flash, Sorchone revisited what he had just observed, for clues to what was on the young man’s mind, then shelved it for later. He kept his reply noncommittal and offhand, scrupulously leaving several avenues for Raian’s pride to find haven. Raian responded like water flowing into the channel cut for it, with grateful if unwitting trust. Sorchone sighed.

  Sorchone’s caution about the king proved timely. Barely three nights later, Deorgard stormed into his royal sleeping quarters and announced himself by backhanding Raian half the length of the room.

  “Rat!” he bellowed, as Raian tucked into a ball and rolled away. “Rat! Rat!”

  Raian’s gut turned to ice. Never highly articulate, nonetheless Deorgard usually managed to throw in a qualifier or two such as “rotten,” “blackhearted,” or, famously, “cheat-spurted.” The naked epithet implied a depth of rage he had never before beheld even in the temperamental warlord.

  The world contracted.

  Somewhere between noisy normalcy and yammering madness lies a still, silent vale of utter clarity. Raian usually had to push himself to it, and when he faced the wolf when he was twelve, he had snapped straight into it. Now he had overshot, plunging on into blind panic. He could feel his world collapsing, taking all power with it. Terror of terror itself braked him; he forced himself to ease—and he was there.

  No thought. No sound. The empty space shaped by the king’s right elbow and side briefly became more real than man or muscle, and Raian dived through and rolled to his feet beyond. Deorgard turned like the sky on its axis.

  Gracefully he caught the small, but thick and heavy, table by his bed and lobbed it at Raian, who punched it aside without feeling it. Raian dived past Deorgard again, rolled in the rushes and kicked out at the back of the royal knees. Deorgard collapsed, almost sitting on him. Raian allowed himself to be flung aside.

  The king lumbered to his feet and struck again. Raian’s hand closed on the clay bottle that had fallen from the table and swung it into Deorgard’s head. Shards flew, mead sprayed. Deorgard shook his head, sending drops—

  Raian blinked, confused by a large black patch before him and the smell of mead-wet earth at his left cheek. ‘Up’ had shifted to his right. He had the odd sense that sound—the vague noise of a household beyond a woven wall, the rustle of clothing on someone nearby—had returned as suddenly as light in a cave at the striking of a spark; for that matter, so had existence itself, though he could not place losing either sound or sense. He heard Sorchone’s voice somewhere above and behind him, and then pain blinded him. The black patch rumbled ominously like the king, and then the world faded and was gone.

  The world returned roaring with pain, and with Sorchone’s voice coaxing him to drink something. He thought he would rather puke, but his slave’s advice on restorative beverages had never been bad, and he struggled to obey. The minty stuff went down easily and settled in to quell all revolt. The world faded again.

  He woke, slept, woke. Sometimes Wolf was there, sometimes Sorchone. Once it was Bradgith, who spoke to him but he could not recall afterwards what was said, or if he even replied. Sometimes he heard soft voices as of several people at the edge of his small, room-sized world.

  When he emerged at last, aching and tender and his skull bandaged but mostly unbroken, he was amazed to discover that scarcely half a week had passed. It felt like a year, or another lifetime.

  Certainly he did not recognize himself reflected in the faces around him. He seemed to have grown, though he felt he had been hammered a handspan shorter. Whispers and glances followed him. Friendly, hostile, mocking? He could not tell, until he almost collided with Maglad.

  The king’s man did not glance or whisper. He stared. Taken by surprise, Raian stared back while he scrambled to understand whether this was challenge or scorn or something else. Then the grim man nodded, curtly enough but his dour face flickered with some lighter feeling entirely, and he strode on before Raian could recover.

  Raian stayed where he was, confounded. There Wolf found him shortly.

  “You look chewed up and spat out, boyo,” he grinned. “But worth it, yah?” He punched his shoulder and laughed at his groan, but he apologized.

  Raian ignored it, hunting in his face. “‘Worth it’? How so? What’s—” he waved vaguely at the small snow-mucky town, “—up with—with everyone?”

  Wolf’s grin grew. “You’re not dead, are you? —Where ya going, the smithy? I’ll walk with you—So you’re tough, or His Bigness thinks you’re worth keeping, or both, yah? Besides,” he added mysteriously, making the minutest nod towards the bards’ hall, “if Bradgith’s happy, ain’t they all!”

  Raian started. “What’s he happy—” and broke off as the master bard himself stepped out into the white snow-glare.

  Bradgith strode directly to him. Raian braced his stance; the old man had a way of looking down his long hooked nose like an archer sighting along an arrow. “The king holds court,” he murmured abruptly; a command. Then his glance flicked to the iron shears clutched in Raian’s hand. He nodded at them. “But hasten,” he advised, and swept on towards the hall.

  “See?” said Wolf, jogging along with him as he hastened. “Got him holding court like a right ’un!”

  So that was it. As he hurried back to take up his accustomed post, Raian did not trouble to hide his smirk until he reached the hall door itself. He did not always approve of Deorgard’s rulings. He often disapproved, in truth. But, Maolin’s Fist!, a people wanted more than a, a gang leader for a ruler!

  Deorgard held court till sundown, breaking only for the day-meal. He did the same the next day. When Raian saw the horde awaiting justice on the third day, word having flown throughout Angowin, his smugness hunkered down and slunk away. He wanted to throttle most of the petitioners, plaintiffs and defendants alike, or to bash their heads together, and this just to be doing something. He rose from his place each evening stiffer than ever, and more fatigued from yearning to be active than activity had ever made him and yet less able to sleep. The king had not spoken to him directly since their fight (which had lasted a little longer than Raian’s recollections of it; Sorchone could not tell him what else had happened nor how much longer, but he had taught him that a shock to the head often cost the memory of what had led up to it), but this night, sensing Raian’s strangled frustration, Deorgard favored him with a surly leer.

  Raian went to bed seething. No, this is not all my fault! he wanted to shout. You’re being childish! Just do the thing right—there’s no call to overdo it like this!

  But overdo it he did for two more days, till the three days of moon-dark when court was neither held nor sought. Then on the first day of the new moon, he held an ordinary morning court and went hunting in the afternoon. The next day he refused to hold court at all, and slowly life returned to its old pattern.

  Raian, barely out of his bandages, saw his master off on a hunt again and returned slowly to his hall. Bradgith sat alone on the dais, as motionless as a carving of wood. Raian nodded politely and turned towards Deorgard’s chamber.

  “He is what he is.” Bradgith’s profound voice rumbled like faraway thunder.

  Raian paused. Er, yes? he thought. Aren’t we all?

  The bard nodded slowly, giving Raian the sudden alarming notion that it was in reply to his thought. Then he saw the old eyes glint as they turned on him. “So you are too,” he said softly, either replying or merely continuing. “So you are too.”

  They locked gazes for an unmeasured time, till Raian bowed awkwardly and withdrew.

  Raian’s first new case found him a mere two days after Deorgard’s last abandoned court.

  “No, I haven’t heard a thing,” Raian informed them bluntly, and, drawing boldness from Bradgith’s cryptic pronouncement, added, “He’s not—like that. You know he’s not.”

  The party—there were four of them—shifted awkwardly, and then the eldest of the lot shrugged. “Aye, aye.” He glanced around at his group, and Raian could not tell from anyone’s manner who among them had the grievance and who bore the blame. “But we agreed we’d hear what you had to say.” He tried to sound nonchalant but all four of them looked suddenly hungry.

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  “Yah? If you can agree to that, you can agree to—to settle in your own way!” It was all he could do not to shout at them.

  Glances flicked among the group. If some of them seemed to have expected this, still they were all the more pleased than put out to hear it spoken.

  “Aye,” said the eldest again. “But, good to hear others’ counsel,” he pointed out doggedly.

  Raian gaped. Then he sighed. He kicked over a bucket, sat down upon it and waved for them to speak.

  One day Sorchone, appearing to fill wood-baskets without appearing to be shadowing the king, paused as he saw his quarry pause. The single street was empty for the moment. Deorgard withdrew onto a neighbor’s porch as a pair of men left his own and Raian’s pale form, ghostlike against the dark of the hall, carefully closed the great doors. The two men turned aside together, in evident amity. Deorgard seized his own beard and twisted. A strangled gurgle, barely audible, escaped him. He half-turned, his whole body contorting in his agony of mind. Then, as suddenly, he slumped and snorted. He let go his beard and straightened, stretching, and scratched his head thoughtfully. He growled again, his fists balling—and then shook his head and stared about at nothing. Then he set off again for his hall, trailing Sorchone in his wake without noticing him.

  Sorchone sped up so that he opened the door only just after a doorward inside had closed it for the king, and he reached the king’s chamber in time to see him glare down at Raian sitting on the floor.

  Again the strange strangling rose in Deorgard’s throat. Raian stared, baffled, as the king without speaking turned and stomped out, almost trampling Sorchone.

  The young Runedaur poured himself into a dark corner and curled up in silent laughter. Thereafter his self-imposed exile here was much lightened, watching the man he studied hamstring himself between resentment—and relief.

  “Hey, boyo—it’s a big one tonight! Let’s see what new tricks our teacher-boy’s got!”

  With the king and Maglad once again secreted away with Bradgith, Wolf surprised Raian in Deorgard’s hall and bowled him and his polishing over, almost into the fire pit. Raian tried to grab Wolf’s mouth, and Wolf wrangled back gleefully until, with a painfully powerful twist, Raian forced his friend’s arm behind his back and, “Shh! Just shut up for a minute!” he hissed ferociously.

  Wolf froze. Oh, good man, Raian thought, relieved, and loosed him.

  Wolf affected great interest in massaging his abused arm. “Yah?” he murmured.

  “He’s gone,” Raian replied under his breath.

  There was a pause from Wolf. “Huh. Bolted?”

  “I haven’t seen him since last night.”

  “Does he know the collar means he’ll be killed on sight?”

  “As far as I know. And it’s winter.”

  “Then he’s—hah, I was going to say he’s crazy, but with all he knows, maybe he’s just foxy. I mean, who’s going to chase him down in this weather?”

  “Maybe,” Raian muttered. “Crazy or not, I’m not telling anyone.”

  Wolf punched his arm. “I’ll eat a bowl of live crickets before I’ll rat him out.” He thought for a moment. “So, what’ll you say if they ask you?”

  Raian snorted. “That I don’t rat people out. Besides,” he went on, scowling his puzzlement, “he thought ahead. Like he was looking out for me, buying me time, or something. All the laundering’s been done, the woodboxes loaded, all that soap cut and stacked—”

  Wolf looked blank. “Yah? That’s, um, that’s—” he scratched at his head for a moment, thinking that carefully catching up on his slave’s chores before running away from them would never have crossed his own mind, then finished lamely, “uh, decent of him—?”

  “Yah,” Raian murmured distantly. “Hey—Wolf?” he began hesitantly.

  Their eyes met in mutual understanding, and identical uneasiness.

  “This Angowin—it’s only western Aellicia, wouldn’t be any more than an easy week from the Uissig border,” Raian remarked with feigned nonchalance, and stared at the inside of the royal door.

  “In fair weather!” Wolf retorted instantly. “And knowing the roads!”

  “We could pack enough food for a good ways, with a tight belt. We wouldn’t starve,” he pointed out.

  “So long as nothing happened: no storm, no broken legs, no getting lost. And, yah, we’ve got the scarves to hide these,” he tugged angrily at his collar, “right up till somebody invites us in and wonders why we stay all bundled up!”

  “Or why we decline to come in at all,” Raian agreed grimly. They would need aid, in the Uissig, getting the collars unspelled, and his own inability to break the magic festered in his heart.

  “Right! Listen, Rai, I hate this as much as anyone, but I’m not ready to die out of it. Spring’s coming. And the Son of Death out of Night is—?”

  Raian half-grinned. “Winter. I know. You’re right. I’m just—” he twisted, hating to say it but feeling a need to face down the chance, “well, we’re not just, uhhh, well, cowards, staying put?” Arriving collared in Dunwyrding-land: was it cowardice that feared that shame, or courage that endured here until the shame could be undone?

  The question was preposterous enough to Wolf’s mind; that Raian, hero of so many adventures, could ask it in evident sincerity, his only option was to wrestle sense back into his wooden head till Deorgard’s cousin and housemistress, Gulhen, beat them apart with her broom.

  Later, some of the other thralls asked after Sorchone, when they saw Raian taking care of duties that had been his, but they retreated before his glare. Not till the next evening did any of the free men and women who served in Deorgard’s hall trouble to ask, and not till noon of the third day did Gulhen discover her missing property. Confronted, Raian refused to say anything, but merely stared his despite of slavery and everything to do with it. The woman drew back her fist to strike him, and he secretly winced at the thought of her blow connecting with any of his still-tender spots.

  “Ah, faugh,” she snapped. “If His Majesty and all his brawn can’t beat obedience into you, I’m a fool to think I can. But,” she warned, shaking a thick finger under his nose, “I have other ways!”

  He closed his eyes, the better to summon every wisp of power he possessed not to bite or even bite at the scolding finger. If she thought he closed them in fear, so much the better. He expected a mighty list of chores from her on the morrow, and hoped Sorchone had better winter skills than himself or Wolf. I hope you make it, was his last thought before sleep.

  He woke before dawn, staring into the gloom. Something—was different. He might go back to sleep, as not even Gulhen was yet stirring, though it could not be long now. Suppose she found him up and already at work? He grinned darkly at the thought, and rolled to gain his feet and rolled into a body. He almost yelped.

  There where Sorchone’s pallet had been until Raian had added it to his own, someone lay curled small, wrapped in a blanket. Cautiously, Raian pulled a blanket edge away from the face and made his tiniest magelight.

  “Whuhh?” Sorchone slurred, and squinted even in the thin glow.

  Unable to yell as he would like, Raian settled for punching him, hard.

  “What? What?” Sorchone hissed, curling up tighter. “’S not time to get up yet!”

  “Where in all the hells have you been?” Raian whispered back fiercely.

  Sorchone twisted his face back around towards Raian. “What? Where have I been? Since when? Where in all the hells am I going to go? Do I know where I am?”

  Shocked, Raian punched him again. “You aren’t pretending you weren’t gone!”

  “Fine! I’m not! Whatever you say!” Sorchone snarled in a whisper. “Can we go back to sleep now?”

  For answer, Raian seized his arm and dragged him from the king’s bedroom and made him wash up and prepare for the day.

  But neither Raian nor anyone else could get a sensible word from Sorchone, who alternated between bewildered anger and cowering at theirs, and yet steadfastly swore he had no idea what they were talking about. He was alone, friendless in an unfamiliar land, marked for death—and it was winter, and him with only a blanket that was not even his own; did he look like such a fool? Over the next few days, Raian watched, stunned, as everyone else, even Gulhen, slowly forgot that they had ever missed Sorchone’s presence.

  “Don’t be absurd, boy!” she snapped, once when Raian mentioned it to her. “As if I would lose anything out of this household! And I don’t like sneaks, who try to bring trouble on the heads of others! Just you do your work even as well as he, now.”

  And indeed, by a week later he was beginning to wonder if he had somehow dreamed it. Certainly he had nothing tangible to speak otherwise.

  “No,” Wolf grunted, but he shook his shaggy head like a dog shaking off water. “No. He was gone. I remember how we talked about—you know—”

  “I remember.”

  “Maybe he has magic? To make people forget?”

  “Then why would he come back?”

  Wolf growled. “Beats me.”

  And that was all they had. Afterwards, Raian’s clearest recollections were of his own amazement watching everyone’s vanishing recollections—including his own.

  Two days after Sorchone's reappearance, a killer gale blew in, burying the little town in hip-deep snow, felling trees and ripping away roof-shakes. Three members of various outlying farms died, two of fever following a chill, and one lost in the blizzard. Raian and Wolf, dangling from ropes strung over the steep roofs with buckets of new-ripped shakes and pegs, looked across at each other and needed no word between them to mark their patient wait for Spring—or Her earliest herald.

  The Sferiari called it Sleinndrwyth, the Gate of Spring; the Geillari called it Jasta, the Quickening. Both celebrated it halfway between solstice and equinox, though both were well aware that the actual change in the Sun’s path occurred a few days earlier. Why the Mother of All set Areolin on an imbalanced path, mere mortals were not to know. Perhaps it was their mortal task to help draw things back into balance.

  Whatever humans’ role in the cosmos, Jasta in the kingdom of Angowin meant that the women of Dunmadroch and Dun Heorbrann took over the royal hall. For three leagues around, every freewoman left her household in the care of her eldest girlchildren and gathered to her queen, in whose ritual stead stood Deorgard’s daughter Angolaf. If Raian thought there was a chance of seeing her lovely handmaiden Gulda again, he was disappointed.

  “Just as well,” Wolf sneered, “if you’re still only going to gawp like an old owl at her!” Raian promptly seized Wolf’s head and stuffed it in the snow.

  Raian and Wolf, with Sorchone, and Wolf’s elderly thrall and a few other slaves, stacked firewood in the bailey of Tilderuld. Freemen rolled out a cask of mead, and the menfolk prepared to make a night of it. Now, in Winter’s deadliest hour, they would honor fire and light in their own way. Fortunately the weather held—

  “Ye mind lahst year, how it snowed, and we had to crowd into Maglad’s, and draw straws for the fire-tending!”

  “Ah, ye’re gone daft already. That were two years ago; last year were that wind, blew that brand into yon pine, see how it’s half burnt away?”

  “No,” said a third, “that’s levin-struck, that is! The tree as burned the holy night was that oak!”

  “Well, all right, but ’t was last year, aye?”

  Tonight lay still under thick cloud. Drinking men argued jovially over the significance of the starless sky on this night honoring Light. Raian, squatting with Wolf on a log by the woodpile, snorted. “Good omen, bad omen—a man makes his own omens, I think.”

  “That’s my boy,” Wolf retorted pointedly. Raian shoved him off the log.

  Craftsmen ruled this night, beginning with the smiths, and the first of these were the weapon-wrights. About the fire they danced a reenactment of Great Maolin forging His own Daughter, Stahror, the first Spear, She of the gleaming black shaft with a head, though purest gold, as hard as diamond, as tough as mountains, as sharp as glass. Raian and his small crew of thralls were goaded at entirely-unnecessary spearpoint into passing more logs to the firetenders, and the blaze honoring Stahror’s holy Mother, Sorche the Flame, roared up taller than Tilderuld’s palisades.

  Healers followed; Angowin’s crystal-smith begged off for the second-to-last place, when the coals should be white-hot for his glassblowing. Carpenters, brewers, saddlers all paid homage to Fire, and the slaves shifted log after log. Raian watched the parade of artisans, admired their skills, and idly wondered which he might have chosen, had he need. A young noble, his future had been chosen for him: he would sit in council and make laws and judgments—something which a bare couple of years ago had seemed a deadly bore, and he marvelled at himself now—and lead troops, though Uissigari troops marched chiefly against wolves and the occasional lion, and only rarely some brigand band. He frowned now, wondering just when his unwelcome master would present the Uissig with a military threat.

  He glanced aside at Wolf. There had never been any question that Wolf would serve under Raian’s banner, only in what rank. Few of Wolf’s class, though, soldiered to the exclusion of some trade, and Raian tried to think what work his friend might take up. His father was a wastrel, yet even if he were not, there were three brothers ahead of him and not all a man’s sons could follow in his trade. Wolf’s mother was a brewer of some note, at least in her quarter of Teginau. . . .

  “Wolf?” he asked in the break following the potters’ play. “What would you want to be doing?”

  Wolf shot him a look of pure astonishment and shoved him off the log in turn. “Following you, boyo,” he grunted. As Raian picked himself up, Wolf added, “Why? Got something you want me to do?”

  Raian grinned. Wolf could track, hunt, fight and, despite a propensity to grumble, keep his head. “Yah, I reckon you’re already doing it!” He shoved Wolf back off their log and they wrangled till one of the bards cracked his staff across both their heads at once.

  From the center of town, from Deorgard’s hall, a high sweet music drifted faintly. If women could not be bards—at least, not outside the Uissig—they made up for it in their several singing priestesshoods. Men at the outer edges of the bonfire-crowd, feeling like eavesdroppers, pushed their way closer to the fire and the mead, and urged the performers to greater noise.

  This the glassblower could not do, not and shape his ritual gift to Fire. In the silence of the men, then, as the glowing vessel slowly took goddess-form, the remote singing of the women seemed satisfyingly apposite.

  In the last and chief place, the bards sang, and last of these was of course Bradgith.

  Sorchone had been paying only academic heed to the holy proceedings. He knew nothing of the customs of this country and, while he had heard something of the Runedaur moot concerning the gods, still considered them abstract enough to await poetry, should he ever take it up. Watching men, however, was his craft: and now poetry leapt to mind, and the phrase it brought him, as Bradgith began to sing, was: the subtle patter of jaws dropping all around.

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  The great hammer of Haelfarn Bronzebender struck, and the earth rippled beneath his forge. He lifted the seeming leaf and watched till its sunlike glow set into red, then passed it to his apprentice Gulfham.

  “Quench it quickly!” he commanded, and turned away.

  Gulfham gazed slackjawed at the shining beauty, scarce able to believe it was a thing of craft at all. And its glow dimmed, dimmed further—

  “Gulfham!” bellowed the master. The youth jumped, and the new-made spearhead fell from his tongs to the floor, among the haft-shavings that he had forgotten to sweep away. The shavings kindled and burst into flame. Gulfham flung down his tongs and snatched up the spearhead in his hands—and with a howl of pain dropped it again among the shavings. He stomped at the little fires, but the wind of his kicking scattered them gaily about the forge.

  “Gulfham!” bellowed his master again, and again the apprentice seized and then dropped the spearhead.

  Roaring like his own fires, Haelfarn seized his rain barrel and pitched its contents across the fire-lively room. The icy water caught Gulfham full in the chest. It flung him his length upon the floor where he lay gawping and choking and flapping like a fish, but all the little fires hissed and drowned.

  From his back, Gulfham raised the spearhead, now a bent and twisted wreck of itself.

  Haelfarn called for his rod, and when he had beaten the boy for his error and both could speak again without emotion, Gulfham brightened.

  “I have made a new piece, Master!” he announced proudly, and brought it forth.

  Haelfarn turned it in his fingers, snapped it in two, and, “Rubbish!” he pronounced. “Melt it down and make it again.”

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  Stories of Haelfarn First-smith abounded at this season; a few of the junior bards had already presented some. Antic tales of his hapless apprentice Gulfham Hollowhead, though prized in the mead hall, never in any living man’s memory had been sung this night of all nights. Nor did master bards stoop to comic songs, for they were thought but a crowd-sop, and a drunken crowd at that. The assembled Dunmadroch men, all gawping like the Hollowhead themselves, missed joining the first chorus:

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was thus, was thus, was thus;

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was the wonder of all the world.”

  Worse and worse: a chorus? Playful songs had repetitive lines for all to join, not solemnities before the gods! Awe shrouded their master bard, but now a few whispers dared wonder if Age’s debt was come due and begun to claim Bradgith’s wits at last.

  Yea or nay, it had yet no claim upon the power of his voice.

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  The next day the Bronzebender took a cloak-brooch like a living rose from the fire. Ever eager to learn, and loath to be tardy again, Gulfham quenched it at once.

  “No!” bellowed his master, and in his chagrin the Hollowhead jerked back too quickly and dashed the quenching bucket across the forge floor. His master’s heel slipped in the resulting mud and his fall propelled Gulfham back into the rack of spear-staves, which crashed merrily about their heads and shoulders. Gulfham leaped up snatching at them, one rolled beneath his foot and he fell again, cracking his skull into Haelfarn’s as the master struggled to rise.

  And again, after his beating, Gulfham displayed yet another apprentice-piece.

  “Ha, well, at least a child need not be wholly ashamed of such work!” Haelfarn sneered, and glared into Gulfham’s beseeching eyes. “Are you a child? Melt it down and make it again!”

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  The spell of the story and Bradgith’s rich voice banished the whispers, and everyone joined in every chorus after, till Night’s vasty hall echoed.

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was thus, was thus, was thus;

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was the wonder of all the world.”

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  And the next day, Haelfarn set Gulfham to the bellows, strictly warned to keep the coals just this perfect delicate pink. And slowly and steadily the youth’s great muscles pressed and pulled and pressed and pulled and pressed and pulled and pressed and pulled and presently his thought wandered back to his last night’s dream, and an idea that had wakened in him. Press and pull, press and pull, and slowly in the rhythm he began to feel how he could do thus, yes maybe, and—maybe thus, too, and—oh, yes, that ought to work! As the tangled thought unwound in his mind, and its end grew both more likely and more wonderful, his delight poured unheeded into his arms, as in his fancy he worked his hammer—

  “GULFHAAAM!” screamed the master, leaping away from the surging heat, but too late, as his beard burst into flame. Ere either could move, the thatching above succumbed likewise.

  Both men bolted for the doors to call the water witch, and the force of their flight broke the stout timbers. The witch greeted the First-smith with a blast of water to douse his face and then summoned all her powers to bring heaven’s rain to the blazing roof.

  Gulfham spent a week mending the roof, and then another in service to the water-witch in payment. Only then could he show his last work to his master.

  “Your skill grows—a child might venture to be proud of that!” was the verdict. Gulfham hung his head, but in truth he had expected no better, for the small thing fell so far short of the vision in his unforgotten dream.

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was thus, was thus, was thus;

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was the wonder of all the world.”

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  Tradition called for seven mishaps, and seven reviews of Gulfham’s inept work. Bradgith sang three. Then the musical flow shifted, and a strange, uneasy current surfaced, and men held their breath, and their mead-horns hung in their hands, forgotten:

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  In the grey dawn Haelfarn raised his foot and kicked over the cot of his sleepyhead apprentice. Only the cot’s wooden bars thudded softly and the braided reeds rustled in the silence. Haelfarn frowned, and poked among the blankets. No cry of surprise or protest arose, for Gulfham was not there.

  The Bronzebender stomped out to the cook-fire, to roust the young glutton from his breakfast. But the Hollowhead was not there.

  In vain did he seek at the steam lodge for his wayward apprentice. And even Gulfham’s betrothed stamped her spear-heel till the shaft broke, and cursed that she had not known him all the night, nor felt his warm breath at her ear.

  Haelfarn grumbled his way to his forge, apprenticeless. And there he found the heat of coals well-stoked, and the burnt smell of quenching-oil, and the very air still ringing as faint as fairy bells from the last blow of a hammer.

  Gulfham dropped to his knees and in both trembling hands held up a simple knife.

  The master took it up. Gulfham did not dare look up, nor even breathe. Yet as Haelfarn’s silence deepened, he could stand it no more, and slowly raised his head—to behold a dreadful mask of such black wrath that his senses left him, and he fainted away on the floor.

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  Here where another chorus belonged, Bradgith left no pause for his audience but swept on into the next stanzas:

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  Haelfarn turned and stormed from the smithy, from his croft, from the village, out into the Wild. There his feet found an ancient path, one he had not trodden in many a year, one upon which he had not yet set his apprentice. Up the mountain it led, on and on, hour after hour, twisting past rough crags and steaming hot springs. The Bronzebender climbed tirelessly, powered by fury, even as some dark dragon-fiend twisted in his belly and gnawed at his vitals.

  At last, panting he stood before a heavy curtain of thick green vines, and he pushed them aside, and pushed himself into the crack in the mountain-wall behind, and so came at last to the hall of his own apprenticeship.

  Hot as in a smithy lay the air in that holy place, hot and smelling of molten rock, and from an opening in the far side of the cavern came a whisper of thunder and a deep ruddy glow. For the first time since he had taken it from Gulfham, he raised the knife and gazed upon it.

  A simple knife. How deceptive it is, the word ‘simple’! He is said to be ‘simple’, whose wits are lacking—yet so also is a thing of perfection known by its simplicity, like the perfect orb of the Sun, or a perfect petal! Gulfham’s knife lay in the Bronzebender’s great hands like a shining leaf of serenity upon rude cobbles, its faces as pure as a newborn’s gaze and its edges as sharp as a sigh.

  Haelfarn rushed to the back of the cave and raised the knife high above the glowing lake of bubbling stone beyond. “This should have been mine!” he roared his rage. Then he dropped to his knees, dropped the knife to his knees. “This should have been mine,” he wept, and wept bitterly.

  And then again he rose to his feet, like a serpent coiling. “This should have been mine,” he growled, and drew back his hand to pitch this, his shame and his despair, as far into the sacred lake as his power could send it.

  Long he stood, poised to throw, and did not. At last he lowered it again for one last look, and its beauty stayed his hand. “No,” he whispered, “not this. No, indeed, for I have a much better sheath for you!”

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  Again they were denied a chorus, but only Sorchone noticed, for no one there doubted where the master meant to “sheathe” the apprentice’s triumph, and they clung fearfully to one another, oblivious to the present world, ensnared in story.

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  Out from the secret cave Haelfarn twisted, down the mountainside he sped, back to his valley, his village, his croft and his forge. All the day had gone and half the night, ere he stood once more beside Gulfham’s cot. By the cold starlight he gazed upon the sleep-slackened face of the maker of the steel blade, and he raised the knife in his hammering hand high above the boy’s na?ve heart.

  And smote as though he stood at his anvil—

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  “No!” cried someone in the throng, swiftly muffled by another.

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  —and beheld, alive in the night, a gleaming black shaft with a golden head lying across the sleeping boy. Astonishment, terror, awe froze him in mid-blow.

  And a Voice spoke, like the earth groaning, like the forge-fire roaring, and it said, “Who shaped him?”

  Haelfarn stared down at Gulfham’s face, unbearably young and lineless in sleep, and wondered what his goddess could mean.

  “Who shaped him?” She demanded again, and his very bones quivered.

  Who? Surely we are all sprung of the World Mother—

  “—Formless as slag!” the Holy One roared to shake the stars. “Who shaped him?”

  And the First-smith understood. The beautiful, deadly knife dropped as he opened his mighty hands before his face and gazed at them amazed. And the Hollowhead opened his eyes, and sat up hastily.

  “Master—?” he queried, anxious lest he be at some fault again.

  Haelfarn seized his shoulders and dragged him to his feet. “‘Master’, you call me? ‘Master’ I name you!”

  Then, to make sure his apprentice understood, he cuffed his head sharply and, seizing up the steel, shook it under the boy’s nose. “Learn to recognize worth even when it is your own!” he bellowed.

  ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞ ∞∞∞∞∞

  The roar of delight that went up from the listening men might have drowned out any chorus the bard had sung, but he was wise in the ways of crowds and he merely played on, letting his harp sing alone, till they would hear him again.

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was thus, was thus, was thus;

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was the wonder of all the world.”

  Recognizing the next chorus as the last, every man threw his delight into sheer volume, and yet—

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand

  “was thus, was thus, was thus;

  “The greatest work ever to come from my hand—”

  The old bard had but to lift a hand, and silence stunned the wintry night. The hint of women’s singing in their hall might have been distant elf-bells. And softly, solemnly, Bradgith intoned,

  “Was you.”

  Silence. Then, wild the cheers that rocked Tilderuld as Bradgith graciously bent his head to the crowd, and drew away. Mead-horns lifted once more, voices lifted the chorus again, mingling the two endings and laughing. This would be talked about for the rest of the winter, at least, and the light and catchy tune on everyone’s tongue for years. Ah, it was a good night.

  Bradgith’s exit drew him past the log pile even as Dunmadroch, unled, lofted another round of the chorus, in which both Raian and Wolf joined as lustily as any.

  “Ah, you like?”

  Raian jumped a foot away from Bradgith’s breath suddenly in his ear. “Uh,” he began. Then, realizing that it would be not only pointless but downright dishonorable to try to deny the enjoyment he had just been exhibiting, he pulled himself together enough to blurt, “Why, yes,” in what he hoped were dignified tones and were probably just stuffy.

  The old man drew back and his cold grey eyes slitted thoughtfully. He rarely smiled, and what curled his thin lips now did little to change that. A low, five-beat chuckle, scarcely heard over the hearty celebrants, rose from his chest, and then he melted away down the street.

  Raian stared after him until Wolf punched him in the arm with another flagon of beer and soaked his shoulder, and he shook his bangs aside, laughed, and all but washed the memory away in drink.

  Sorchone did not. The hairs on the back of his neck still stood up. Intent on Deorgard, he had paid little heed to Deorgard’s bard, save to note that the man had an inner stillness that would credit a Runedaur. Even now he found the old man almost as inscrutable as a Master—almost, but not quite.

  That was not a song. That was a game-piece, played in a master move. Sorchone wanted to club himself for a fool thicker than Gulfham. Which move was it, how late in the game?

  And what was the game?