Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (19 page)

Chapter 39

An old wetnurse of my young days, whom I remember chiefly by her bulbous backside and wickedly large breasts, used to say, “Balls! Balls! To get through life, wee Fie, ye’ needs nothing but ye’ balls!”

Indeed
, madam.

Though
the female form was still a mystery to me then, I had my doubts that this woman had any balls to speak of.  But I was aware, as I dragged Cullie and myself out of the Fell-Riding out onto the prairie, that there was a courage in the lad that was lost on me. 

I had caught the pack horse again
.  It was a lucky grab.  I snatched it just at the end of a trailing bridle rein.  I should have felt better.  I should have felt lucky just to be alive.  But Something haunted my thoughts. 

Now
, Cullfor smiling and riding along, I had a feeling that something was seriously out of tune.  It was daylight of our third day out when I caught it, and no weak-kneed coward ever shook more as I vainly tried to vault once again into the saddle.  After a dozen false plunges at the stirrup, gave up the attempt, let Cullie ride, and footed it.

There was a daze between my eyes, which the over
ly weary know well, and in my brain there was a whirling exhaustion that would only let me distinguish two thoughts. 

The
elvish camps had been abandoned. 

And the grasses were blackened but not burnt.

There was no one around, and hardly a sound in the still air as I pushed the Feisty-Goat back into the Trollwater River, and as Cullie and I launched slowly downstream, even these last two thoughts left me.  The storm in my mind had driven all concerns away.  We did not encounter a soul. In a stupefied way, I was aware that the elvish dogs were still there, but not any of the people, but it was merely a flash of distant lightening in my head. 

As the dogs came barking, scrambling at us, growling from the banks
, I merely steered the vessel, half-laughing as the dogs began to fight among themselves.  There was something almost evil in my laugh, I know. 

I think, perhaps,
I had broken though the point where the brain counts things either good or evil.  I had a brief thought:  It may be that the reason good quests fail so often where evil ventures succeed is that the hero blunders forward tirelessly, trusting to the merits of his cause, where the villain proceeds warily as a cat over broken glass.  So apart from these random thoughts, another notion arrived.  I understood then that we had to kill a deer or a pig, sit, and have us a good meal.  And just rest for a week or so. 

S
o, we did.

A wind rustled through the foliage
as we banked that night, and when I came back to our little camp with a deer already skinned, I saw Cullie laugh as though I had brought him a basket of toys.

“
Uncle Fie!  Where did you find a deer without its skin?” he asked, then laughed again uproariously.

And I knew,
or rather felt, two things then:  My earlier suspicions were right, that Halvgar’s boy was a mage, a secret my old friend had not even revealed to me, and I might have saved his life, but I could not have done so if the boy had not been born with an unnatural strengths and magic that was unique to his kind.

The second thing was this:  I loved this little lad.  I loved him as surely as the cold wind that blew across the grass, as surely as the smell of a late spring snow in the wild air, and as surely as his little outstretched, star-shaped hands that reached up to me to hug my neck.

Chapter 40

For almost two weeks we stayed at yet another abandoned
elf camp.  It was a small place.  It sat tucked away were some white-barked birches gave way to a forest of ferns, which concealed us in their deep foliage.  The camp was not a hundred feet away from the river, though you’d never see it from the bank.  Elves were masters as such things.  I had only stumbled upon it by accident during my hunt.  Poles were up for skin tents, and where the skins were taken down I put up a lashing of fern leaves.  Cullie and I lounged around the place in lazy attitudes, making long days of simply relaxing by the fire.  We ate three meals a day out of that deer for two solid weeks.  We told stories.  We laughed.  We never talked about his father or his mother.

“
Follow me, little fellow,” I commanded one day.  We had been lounging all morning, and we had eaten well.  It was already afternoon before we moved at all.  We gathered our meager possessions, along with a few strips of smoked venison.

And we left out for
the river, and I tried to think of what I’d say to Dhal.

Which was useless. 

I stepped out on low rise of stone that was just high enough to see the river—and that’s when I saw something that shocked my already shaken mind.

Dhal.

It was Dhal.

She was rowing in a small elvish canoe, looking this way and that. 
And though it is perhaps a cliché to say that I rubbed my eyes and looked again, that is precisely what I did, then I did I yet again, for I could no more dispel the notion of her as a phantom than I could the notion that my senses had somehow gone awry of themselves.

“
Dhal!” I cried out.

She tilted her head, as if she didn’t trust her senses, either.

“Dhal!” I bellowed, at which she gave such a start that she overturned her little vessel and went splashing about in the river, looking.

Chapter 41

“Gratitude is measured in blood and time.  Never in gold.”

–Dwarven wisdom

Deep inside me was a merriment that stretched as wide as the land itself.  The gloom of the trek lifted.

I
paused, just briefly, looking down at the little face that smiled back up at me. 

Cullie made a flopping motion toward her with his hand.

“Are you sure?”

“
Yes!  Go help her, Uncle!”

Winding down to the curve of the river, I called out her name.

She turned to me, shivering from the cold water.  As she stared toward me, I shuddered, and I wish I could say that this new feeling down my back was awe and wonder, but it was just simple fear, for in those first instants she stared, Dhal did not seem to recognize me.  Indeed, I had ended a dragon that had ended the fiercest dwarves in Yrkland, I had wrecked a drake, and torn apart savage goblins in a manner befitting their own.  But I had never been more terrified than I was at that moment by damn — she seemed utterly confused as she looked at me.

All around her was the dip
and lee of the water’s path, the roar of it, the chill and endless movement of all the cosmos, and it was all scrunched into a peculiar moment stillness, like that of a giant tree, just before it falls. 

Then
, it happened.

S
he smiled.

With a smile on my face, I waded out to her and hugged her.  Kissing her, I felt blessed beyond words.  But good thundering hell if that water wasn’t frigid.  It was so cold that the practical part of my mind took over.

“
Woo!  Let me build you a fire.”

Dhal
squinted.

“
We can’t,” she said.

“
Why?”

Dhal
made an exasperated sound.  She put her arms around herself and looked down in the blackness of a hole the vessel had sunk into.  Then she reached out and turned me, and together we looked up stream. 

We saw nothing.

“Dwarven rangers, “ she said.  “They’re but a few miles behind.”

“
Rangers?”

“
Aye, and they’re the best in Yrkland, sent been sent by the Dwarf-King himself.”

“
Coming for us?”

“
Well, for the child.  Your old friend Gilli had much to say about your adventures to the traveling troupe of dancing dwarf maids.  I imagine, in the end, he thought they were whores of some sort, but they worked for King Bhiers, you know.  The only reason they were there was so that he might hunt in silence in the forests north our little burg.”

“
I don’t understand…” I said, but halted, for I suspected I already did.  Dwarven mages were enormously powerful beings, albeit a strange and difficult power to understand.  I once heard it explained like this:  Just as cold might freeze water, turning it from one form to another without changing it fundamentally, so too can the wizard affect air; they can halt arrows, make a sword crash against the “frozen air”, and even immobilize entire troops of an enemy’s ranks.  I heard other refer to “stopping light” or “thickening the ether”, but I believe they all had the same concept in mind. 

“
They learned, handsome, that the dragon made away with a child.”

“
Which told him he was a wizard.”

“
Aye.  He’s already sent a small troupe of the maids for him.  I take it they failed,” she said, smiling as little Cullfor approached.

“
So now,” I said, speaking ambiguously now for Cullfor’s sake, “the old hunter himself comes for the wizard.”

She understood the way I was speaking and returned my words in kind
as stepped out of the water and scooped him up in a hug.

“
No,” she said, turning to me.  “Bhiers himself is a wizard.  He comes for the wizard’s blood.”

The bastard wants no rivals to the throne.
 

“
We need to head east, through Delmark.”

“
Surely he won’t follow us too far,” she said.

“
You presume his ambitions are lesser than his malice.  I hope you are right.”

Chapter 42

With my lips still fixed from the cold
of the water, I kissed her forehead, and as we all three left the riverside, we paused for a moment in the dimming afternoon light.  I had always sensed that, in life, there were very few people comfortable with silence, and I was pleased to discover that Dhal was among them.  For a moment longer, she allowed me to just soak in the sight of her, and I found I was rapidly taking in her appearance again, and just as rapidly growing fond of it.

She
had stepped back toward the river, staring into the strange little hole, in which her tiny boat had sunk.

“
We’ll need to cross the river,” I said.

“
Aye.  And we may need the money that sunk with my canoe.  But…”

“
Yes?”

“
I don’t know.  Do you see something?”

“
Where?”

“
In there.  In the hole.”

I looked and saw that there was all small torrent of eels swimming about the little vessel.  I chuckled
. 

“
My kind of serpents,” I said, and dived in, regretting it instantly. 

The eels scattered, but it was deeper than I had imagined, tighter and darker, too.  I tugged on the canoe, and was only just able to move it enough to see two canvas packs underneath.  By pulling myself down along the boat, I gathered them up easily enough, and emerged with them, shivering.

“Oh!” she said, smiling.  “Fantastic!”  

And just as
a single twig of hay can break the packhorse’s back, the smile a of a pretty woman can reinvigorate a soul with all the verve and strength of an old hero. 

“
Cullie, come closer, my lad.  Hop on your old uncle’s shoulder.  You too, Dhal.”

“
Both of us?” Dhal asked.  “Come now, I think I’m entitled to keep the secret of my weight.”

“
It’s not you I’m worried about, but that strapping young lad, Cullie.”

She knew I had said in jest, of course, but she looked doubtful.
 

Cullie pulled at her waist. 
“He can do it,” he said.

She glanced at me with touch of playful scorn, then lay herself stomach-down across my shoulder.  There was a moment of doubt on my part, and I hurried to get across before I started shaking with the strain.

Once across, I eased them down into some tall grasses on the bank.

“
Again?” Cullie asked.

“
Not on your life, big fellow.”

He gave an amused snort and shook his head.

“Now stay here,” I told him, “Keep a lookout while I go back and get our supplies.”

He nodded, rolling his eyes at Dhal, who giggled a bit, then gave him a stern shake of her finger.

I stared downriver as I crossed, making a point to look for any flushed game or birds rising in the distance.  I saw none, as luck would have it.  I daresay I felt good, perhaps dangerously good, as I took a lesson from the blustery, dwarven uncle who had all but raised me—I wrote the king a note in the sandbar.

It was a warning.

A
forewarning
. 

But as I
crossed back over and handed the gear up to Dhal, my vague panic grew more distinct.

I pulled myself up out the water, and tried not to dwell on it. 

Then we set out, briskly.

Nearing dusk, we stepped upward through a tangle of maple, moving slowly toward the sound of more water.  We traced uphill, close to a smallish hilltop, where we discovered a spring.  The grass was cropped at the pool’s edge, the work of deer or wild goats.  The spring sent a pair streams down a crevice of mossy wood and then back underground.  There was a smell in the air like jasmine. 

We
sat , resting our sore feet in the streams.  Dhal unclasped her hooded cape from around her shoulders.  She slid it off, then extended it to Cullfor. The wind had picked up, and the slow-growing shadows gathered a shocking cool. 

He grabbed the cape and looked down into the pool,
staring at the moon reflected in it.  Tying the cape around his shoulders, he thanked her.

I
could not say what it was I found soothing about this, but while I could still sleep for a month, my body and mind felt suddenly better.  Which isn’t to say I felt fine.  My mouth had a burnished metal taste in it.  I wondered, briefly, if I was getting sick, for in truth any adventure offers you a thousand ways to die.  Dragons just happened to be among the quickest.

Dhal
looked at me, then stood.  Trekking deep into the small mossy hollow, she eyed me to follow her.

I
went, slowly.  When I paused, I looked back at Cullie.  He was already falling asleep.  Or at least he was pretending to.  I looked at her while she strung the length of herself alongside a fallen log.  It was not like reclining, more like she was
placing
herself there.  There was something curiously engaging about her stillness.  She had a certain dexterity in her lack of motion, folded and pleated as if tossed casually to the ground.  But from the confusion of angles something perfect had emerged, like a piece of art.

She
kept staring, and I was unable to break from her look—besides, there was no energy left in me for decorum and decency.  I was so sleepy, and she was like the leafy edges of a dream, and it felt like something cracked inside my skull when she patted the ground beside her.

As I laid myself next to her, she whispered in my ear. 
“We may have to drink a drop or two of his blood,”

After
another breath, the words hit me. One moment, I thought she wanted to kiss me, then next, she was telling me we might have to drink of drop or two of Cullfor’s blood.

I suppose she did her best not to look amused at the look on my face. 

“Only a drop each,” she added.

This might have been some dwarven custom she had picked up. 
It might have been old human superstition I’d never heard about wizards.  I had no idea.  I put my arm around her, and I called Cullie to us.

Wi
thout discussing the nonsense any further, we slept.

I
stirred at some point in the night, trying to pull some meaning out of a dream about blood, springing up out of the ground around us.  Very soon after, I gave up.  Dhal’s perfection had collapsed into something even more endearing and soft.  Her face was bunched and snoring.  A portion of skin was exposed and red against the log in front of her, but damn if I’d seen anything prettier in this life.

Shifting onto
my side in the blankets, I detached myself from a tangle of her sweaty hair.  Then she nuzzled closely again.  I realized she smelled of new, green berries, and a little like jasmine.

I
tried to go back to sleep, but beside me, Cullie woke with a start.  He breathed in a high-pitched gasp like the call of a bird.

“
What the icy hell?” Dhal said, half-dazed.

Cullfor’s
breath was pushing his heart back down when he was seized on the neck.  Dhal pulled his face toward hers and looked at him with a bulging, bloodshot eye.  I grew tense for a moment, for one doesn’t know what a body can do in the half-dream state we sometimes wake in.  But she merely smiled.

Cullie
stared, smiling back. He pried loose of her grip. 

She shook her head.

When she had fully emerged from her sleep, I ventured to kiss her mouth.  When she offered no protest, I kissed her neck and the lobes of her cold ears.  When I felt myself needing to do more, I paused.

I
kissed her between the eyes, then stood.  The ground was frosty, as if it had transformed into a placid ocean of sparkles.  It dazzled the eye in spite of the low morning light.

I
stretched.  When Dhal emerged more fully into the waking world, she rose.  She was beaming, an elegant and sure expression on her.  Immediately, she knelt and breathed a small prayer under her breath.

Once we woke Cullie, we
got moving.  And we moved swiftly.