Dark Magic (29 page)

They halted there only long enough to rest the animals and drink mulled wine, purchasing sufficient food to see them through the night and the next day, continuing on against the advice of the innkeeper, who promised them more snow would fall, likely through what remained of the day and all the night.

His warning proved correct for the snow fell steadily thicker, a curtain of drifting whiteness as impenetrable
as the dark, bringing an early twilight that found them on a stretch of road running lonely through woodland where great trees arched denuded limbs over their heads, the trunks offering the only likely shelter.

Bracht called a halt, Calandryll willing enough in this inhospitable landscape to concede him leadership and Katya still sunk in despondency, and took them a little way off the road. He appeared unperturbed by their situation, walking the stallion deeper among the trees until he found a glade where cypress and cedars grew close enough together their branches met to form a threadbare semblance of a roof. He dismounted there, setting Calandryll and Katya to gathering wood for a fire while he rubbed down the horses and mantled them with saddle blankets.

Calandryll had thought himself capable by now of surviving in the wild, but to his embarrassment he found it impossible to light the pile of branches, the sparks he struck from his tinderbox spluttering and dying amid the kindling without hint of flame. Furiously he drove flint against striker, with no better results, expressing his frustration with curses as he was forced to recognize his inexperience. He started as a hand touched his shoulder, face reddening as he turned from his task to find Katya standing close.

“Like this,” she advised with a quick, apologetic smile, stooping to add moss to his construction, taking the tinderbox from him and succeeding at her first attempt to raise a flame. “It takes practice.”

“Which our outlaw prince lacks,” Bracht observed, grinning.

Once, in another life, Calandryll might have resented the Kern’s cheerful gibe, but now he only shrugged, returning Bracht’s grin.

“My time with you is a constant education,” he said, chuckling.

“Another lesson, then,” Bracht declared. “I shall teach you how to make a bedchamber.”

He took Calandryll off into the wood as Katya blew
the fire to life, indicating the fallen branches that might be used to form a crude sleeping platform and those that would provide shelter overhead. Under his instruction Calandryll built a rough lean-to, the Kern more rapidly setting up two others.

“It will do for now,” he remarked, “but in Wessyl, if not before, we must kit ourselves against this weather.”

“We should have thought to bring canvas from the warboat,” Katya murmured, the brief display of good humor she had evinced at Calandryll’s fruitless attempt at fire lighting dissolving like the snow that drifted through the branches.

“I’d not thought to find snow so far south,” Bracht said.

Katya nodded without speaking again, crouching with her hands thrust out to the rising flames, her head lowered as if she sought consolation in the blaze.

“Still, we shall be comfortable enough.” Bracht spoke to her back; Calandryll thought he would reach out, touch her, but he seemed to think better of it and made no move, only adding, “We shall sleep dry tonight, and we’ve food.”

He got no answer, and with a troubled glance in her direction set a kettle filled with snow to boil, adding to it what they had purchased earlier so that soon a savory stew simmered.

They ate, the ride and the cold edging their appetites, the stew welcome insulation against the pervading chill. Bracht made some attempt at cheerful conversation, but Katya remained silent save when directly addressed, her mood serving to emphasize the bleakness of their surroundings, and in time the Kern gave up, suggesting they take to their makeshift beds. He banked the fire so that it should last through the night and they each climbed into their respective shelters.

Calandryll stretched out on a layer of springy branches, sweet-scented and comfortable enough,
those above and his cloak holding off the snow if not the cold that seemed to creep inexorably through his body. The fire warmed one side of him, but the other, no matter how tight he wrapped himself in the cloak, remained chilled and he turned constantly, wondering how his companions fared. Both, it seemed, were more accustomed to such hardship, for as he lay shivering restlessly he heard no sounds from their lean-tos, only the crackle of smoldering branches and the sizzling of melted snow, the shuffling and blowing of the horses. He had thought himself inured to discomfort, but this was very different to sleeping rough in Kandahar or the nights spent in the sticky heat of Gessyth, and he began to wonder how he might cope on the plains of Cuan na’For should they need to enter that land. He would, he supposed, adapt in time—he had already adjusted to so many changes—but for now, he decided, he had never felt less comfortable. He yawned hugely and closed his eyes, willing himself to ignore the cold.

It seemed an impossible task and he was surprised, when he opened his eyes again, to realize that the light was changed, the snow no longer drifting canes-cent from the darkness but paled and glittering against a brightening sky: dawn was come and he had slept. His teeth started promptly to chattering again and he crawled from the piney shelter to add fresh branches to the fire, groaning as stiffened limbs protested the movement. He huddled awhile by the blaze, luxuriating in its warmth, watching the eastern sky fade from salmon pink to a blue the color of slate, decorated with shafts of gold by the rising sun. Birds began to sing and he hoped that presaged an end to the snowfall as he pushed upright and went to where the patient horses waited.

They appeared to have suffered no ill effects; indeed, they seemed to have spent a more comfortable night than he, clustering close together to share their body warmth, greeting him with soft snickers and a shaking of heads that sent flakes tumbling in kaleidoscope
colors from their manes. He doled them each a measure of oats and returned to the fire, filling the kettle with fresh snow as Bracht emerged.

The Kern was as little inconvenienced as the animals, stretching as though risen from a bed of duck down, his dark face split by a sizable grin as he saw Calandryll’s expression. He looked toward the animals and Calandryll said, “They’re fed,” the announcement greeted with a nod of approval. He scooped up a handful of snow, rubbing it over his face in lieu of washing, and walked off into the trees.

While he attended to his personal needs Katya rose, no less lithe, as if such nights were usual in Vanu. She glanced at the sky and murmured, “The snow will stop soon,” then she, too, disappeared among the timber. Calandryll spilled tea into the kettle, his companions’ cheerful hardiness serving only to remind him of his own discomfort. Morosely he stirred the brew.

“Your bed was not to your liking?”

He looked up as Bracht came out of the trees, his downturned mouth all the answer the Kern needed. Bracht chuckled and began to rummage through the saddlebags in search of breakfast. Calandryll said, “Katya claims the snow will stop soon.”

Bracht looked up and nodded. “Soon enough, but still it will slow us. The road will likely be hard going.” He turned as snow crunched under Katya’s boots. “How say you?”

The woman shrugged and Calandryll thought she seemed no more cheerful. She said, “Today. Come tomorrow’s dawn it will be melting.”

Calandryll bowed to their superior weather lore, content for now to allow the fire to restore warmth to blood and joints and muscles.

“The inns along this road,” Katya asked, “are they all so close?”

“For travelers in wagons,” he replied, mildly pleased that in this at least he knew more than they. “For traders and the like, who move slower than we.”

Katya grunted a curse. Bracht said, “Then we use
them only when we must,” and chuckled as Calandryll groaned. “We’ll purchase tents when we can—a good tent is shelter enough,”

Calandryll could think of no suitable answer: speed was of the essence, its price, it seemed, discomfort.

Hot tea and breakfast, for all it consisted of no more than dried beef and hard biscuits, cheered him a little and he felt somewhat happier as they mounted and returned to the road.

It was, as Bracht had warned, difficult to negotiate. The snow eased off as the morning grew older, the sky no longer banked with grey nimbus but brightened to a hard and cloudless azure, the sun striking brilliant sparks from the great drifts that lay across their way, the horses plunging sometimes chest-deep, Bracht’s powerful stallion breaking them a trail, the geldings content enough to follow in his path. They made the best time they could, but even so dusk fell before they came in sight of the next caravanserai and—the decision eliciting a sigh of relief from Calandryll—chose to spend the night there.

The place was twin to Portus’s establishment, if more crowded with itinerants who had opted to wait out the blizzard. They learned that Daven Tyras had passed through, but now, thanks to the storm, had gained a day or more. This news was taken with phlegmatic acceptance by Bracht, less stoically by Calandryll, while Katya, who had lost some of her gloom during the day, fell once more into brooding. Nonetheless, to bathe in hot water and eat well before retiring to comfortable beds were luxuries that cheered them all and they departed the next morning in better spirits.

The day, too, cheered them, the sun establishing itself early in a sky free of cloud, warming the air so that what snow yet remained began, just as Katya had promised, to melt rapidly, their pace increasing steadily as they cantered northward, hooves splashing rainbows from the puddles that now spread across their way.

That night they once again found shelter in a caravanserai, though for the next three they slept in the open, Calandryll finding, to his delight, that he grew increasingly accustomed to such rude accommodations, even that, under Bracht’s tutelage, he mastered the art of the campfire. Within a day or two, he estimated, they would reach Wessyl, and with that calculation came the sudden realization that the days lengthened, spring, for all this inclement weather, advancing steadily.

He had kept no calendar—it seemed a pointless exercise where they had gone, save perhaps to count off the days to the Mad God’s raising—and it was a shock that the winter solstice had gone unnoticed for it was celebrated in Secca with feasting and revelries, a great masked ball in the palace, and when last he had participated he had sat at his father’s side, his eyes seeking Nadama among the crowd, jealous of her attention, alarmed when she danced with Tobias. This year the festival had gone unnoticed, his attention occupied entirely by the quest. Indeed, he had forgotten to observe any of the festivals since departing Secca—the days devoted to the gods, his own birthday, all had passed unheeded. He was a year older—it seemed far more and soon it would be a full year since he had fled his home. He smiled thoughtfully as the weight of time sank in: it seemed so long, and yet no time at all, as if his journeying with Bracht and Katya were a thing entire unto itself, unending. Perhaps, he thought, it is; Menelian had suggested that Tharn must lie beyond the limits of the world and perhaps we must journey beyond the limits of time to thwart Rhythamun. That alone felt solid, a fact infrangible: that Rhythamun must be thwarted; though still he was not sure how, only that the pursuit must continue.

That night he offered a prayer to Dera, asking the goddess’s forgiveness for his omissions and her aid in the successful conclusion of the quest. If she heard, she returned no sign, and he fell asleep wondering if
perhaps she turned away her face, consigning the folk of Lysse to the awful fate threatened by the Mad God. It seemed to him a terrible carelessness if it were so, but he could not shake off the doubt and in the morning his mood was akin to Katya’s: one of somber reflection.

He cursed himself for such pessimism, but it remained with him as they galloped northward through a day turned squally, rafts of serried grey cloud blowing constantly off the Narrow Sea to send rain drumming in fierce outbursts, as if in confirmation of his fears.

They traversed moor and marshland now, ahead only a dull landscape of undulating hills and tussocky grass, colorless beneath the neutral sky. The road wound around the hillocks, weaving among them as if to tantalize with its promise of swift passage, the land to either side bare and windswept, scattered with reedy ponds and little rivulets that filled the ancient road with puddles, or, where the way dipped lowest, overran the dirt in muddy streams. It was a bleak terrain that seemed populated by nothing save curlews and honking geese, devoid of farmsteads or other travelers, the last caravanserai passed that morning, the next, save they be delayed, certainly found too soon to merit halting, leaving the prospect of a damp and miserable night.

It was a surprise to come upon the crone in such a place.

At first, as they rounded the shoulder of a drumlin shadowed by the westering sun, it seemed a great bundle of reeds was somehow animated, proceeding along the road of its own volition. Only when the heap wavered and fell, sheaves scattering, did they see the woman beneath, her threadbare gown a fusty green of a shade so similar to her burden as to merge, indistinguishable, with the rushes she stooped to gather. Calandryll slowed his horse as they approached, seeing a face scoured by age and wind turn toward him, a hand rising to brush meager strands of
ivory hair from a forehead webbed with wrinkles, eyes a dulled and hopeless blue observing him dispassionately. The ancient made neither sound nor movement, seeming not to anticipate help or sympathy, but only to wait, silently watchful. Unthinking, he brought the chestnut to a halt. Bracht turned the black stallion to the side as if to ride around the old woman, then thought better of it and reined in. To the rear, Katya followed suit.

“Shall I help you, mother?”

Calandryll swung down as he spoke. Bracht said, “We’ve leagues to cover yet,” and Calandryll gestured at the crone, bending to loop rein about fetlock, saying, “Would you leave her unaided?”