The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage (52 page)

“By all means,” Emla said. “But be you well enough?”

“That I am, truly.” Niffa managed a bright smile. “I’ll just be putting his supper together and grabbing my cloak and going.”

By the time she left the compound, the full moon was rising in a cloudless sky. With Demet’s supper in one hand and a lantern in the other, Niffa made her way across the crannogs to the lake shore. In the moonlight the stone town walls rose like the shadow of death. Her heart began to pound so hard that she had to stop for a moment and gulp cold air.

“Who goes?” The voice belonged to Gart, the watch-sergeant.

“Just Niffa. I’m bringing my man’s supper.”

Gart himself materialized out of the shadows at the base of the wall.

“Well, now, it be needful for you to wait a bit,” the sergeant said. “I did send him across to Citadel.”

The shouting voices in her mind roared, deafening her. Dimly she was aware of Gart hurrying forward. He caught her elbow and steadied her.

“What be so wrong, lass?”

“Oh, the cold air and little else. Citadel? Will he be there long?”

“I’ve no idea. We were up on the walls, and we did see the strangest thing, so I did send him across to see what it might be. It were a light, a silvery light up on the very peak of the isle, where that fallen house or whatever it might be lies.”

“The stone ruins, then.”

“Those, indeed, and they lie too close to our armory for me to ignore any strange goings-on among them. Here, give me that lantern, and then walk you down the shore a little ways, and see if you can see it there still. It were such a strange light I did wonder if we both were seeing some fancy, Demet and I.”

Picking her way across the dark and trampled snow, Niffa walked a fair bit away from the pool of lantern glow. When she looked up toward Citadel, she could see its crest clearly above the mists. Sure enough, a silver light shone, the strangest color she’d ever seen burning, but no, it was too cold for a fire—more like moonlight, turned thick and brought down to earth, but touched with blue. It flickered, a mere point or glint, disappeared for a moment, reappeared, then swelled, grew brighter, spread and swelled into a huge moon that spilled silver light, washing over her and dragging her off like a great wave. She heard Gart shouting in alarm.

Silence cut the shout short, a strangely live silence that hovered on the verge of sound. She rode the silence as if it were a swell of lake water, carrying her across to Citadel, or rather, her vision did. Somewhere in the back of her mind she was aware of lying on cold snow and of Gart, kneeling beside her, but him she could not see, because her power of seeing had gone across the lake. What she did see was stone, draped by silver light like tattered cloth, clinging to the walls of a tunnel. On the ground, on a stone floor, lay a man, facedown, his arms and legs all akimbo. Nearby stood a woman with long dark hair, laughing as the light faded.

Niffa screamed, and with her scream her sight returned to the lake side and the golden flickering of the candle lantern. Gart was trying to help her sit up.

“Demet!” she whispered. “You’ve got to get to Demet. In the stone ruins.”

In the lantern light she could see him staring at her, puzzled at first. Suddenly he made some decision.

“Right you are,” Gart said. “Here, let me get you to your feet and off this frozen ground.”

With his help Niffa could stagger up and retrieve the lantern. Bellowing out names, Gart ran for the guardhouse down by the main gates. She saw other lanterns bloom as men hurried out and answered him. She hesitated, wondering where she should go to wait, but Gart called to her to follow.

“You do wait in here by the fire, lass. Me and Stone will be rowing over to fetch your man.”

The men left on guard ignored her. She sat down on a stool in the corner of the tiny wooden room and watched the fire burning on the stone hearth. Smoke swirled and flew upward, sucked toward the smokehole in the roof. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder if she could call upon her visions when she wanted them rather than waiting for them to come to her. Demet, she thought. Show me Demet, oh please, show him to me. The smoke and the flames remained naught but fire and smoke.

The wait went on and on. At a table the other guards diced for splinters of wood but said next to nothing. Were they alarmed, too, she wondered, or did they think her daft and their sergeant more so, to listen to the witch girl? Now and again someone got up to put a log on the fire, then sat back down without looking her way. In the glowing palaces of the coals she tried to see pictures, begged the pictures to come to her—nothing. Eventually she heard a voice from outside and leapt up, but it was Emla, letting herself in the door. She was muffled in a dark cloak that set off her pale face.

“Niffa!” she snapped. “And what be you up to, sitting here? Where’s Demet?”

The men all turned to look at her as she shook her head free of the cloak’s hood. Niffa tried to speak but found no words.

“What be so wrong?” Emla whispered. “Where be my son?”

“I know not, Mother.” Niffa stood up and held out her hand. “Do come sit and I’ll stand.”

Emla perched on the stool. At first she seemed to be framing some question, but the mood of the room caught her, and she stayed silent. More waiting, more smoke and flame that leapt upward without visions or hints—the men diced, speaking not at all now.

“Hola!” A shout in Stone’s dark voice. “Come out, come out!”

The men rose and grabbed cloaks, then rushed out the door. More slowly Niffa and Emla followed, carrying lanterns. Stone and Gart were hauling a coracle up onto the lake shore and straining on the rope as if they pulled a burden, not a little leather boat. Niffa screamed and went running, so fast the candle in her lantern lost its flame. She knew, then, knew with the coldness of a sliver of ice stuck into her heart even before she reached them. She grabbed the slimy-wet side of the coracle and leaned over.

Demet lay in the bottom of the boat, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes still open, staring at nothing. Somewhere a woman was screaming, high and wordlessly, over and over. Why don’t they make her stop? Niffa thought to herself. Only when Gart grabbed her shoulder did she realize that the voice was her own.

“He did see, Verro!” Raena hissed the words out. “It were needful to silence him. He saw, I tell you. He saw Lord Havoc!”

Verrarc wanted to grab and hit her, so badly that the urge burned as strong as lust. When he took a step forward, she shrank back and threw one hand up before her face. What are you? he told himself. Your father’s son indeed! He crossed his arms hard over his chest and tucked his traitorous hands into his armpits.

“What if he’d told his wife?” Raena said, and her voice shook on the edge of fear. “Think, Verro! What if he’d told little Niffa?”

“Well, now.” He forced his voice steady. “That would have been a worse thing, truly. But by all the gods, Rae, yours and mine both, a death in Cerr Cawnen is a grievous thing. No one will be letting this matter lie.”

“Ah, but you be the one looking into it, like, baint? Who but you, a councilman and the powerful man that the ratters do hold as a friend?” She risked taking a few steps toward him and smiled. “You be the man who’ll be saying who did what or that naught did happen but a sudden fever. There be not a mark on him, Verro. You did see that when the sergeant fetched you.”

“So I did.”

Under the bedchamber window stood a wooden chest. He sat on it and let his arms go limp, his hands hanging between his spread knees. The cold draft from the shutters soothed him, like the touch of a hand on a fevered face.

“How did you kill him?” he said.

“What? I did never!” Raena crossed to him in two graceful strides and flung herself down in a kneel. “Verro, Verro! How could you think it of me? It were Lord Havoc!” She caught his hands and pressed them to her chest while she leaned against his knees. “I know not how he did slay the lad. It were dweomer, stronger than any that ever I did see before.”

“Ai! Forgive me, my love. I did think—I know not what to think, truly. Forgive me!”

He pulled her tight against him and held her, shaking against his chest. But even as he murmured soothing words, he wondered at himself, that he’d been so ready to think her a murderess, the moment that the town watch had woken him to tell him of Demet’s death.

As the youngest member of the town council, Verrarc was in charge of the town watch and all matters pertaining to it. How was he going to satisfy his fellow citizens while protecting Raena? The question kept him awake for what was left of the night, even though Raena slept soundly right beside him, not waking even when he gave up the fight for sleep and left their bed.

After a few bites of breakfast he left the house and went down to the lake shore and the boathouse belonging to the Council of Five. He found Admi, the town’s chief speaker, waiting for him. Wrapped in the red cloaks of council members, they walked back and forth on the gravelled shore in the dark grey of a winter’s morning. The lake lapped and steamed beside them.

“There be no use in our going across till proper sunrise,” Admi said.

“Just so,” Verrarc said. “Last night by candlelight I could tell naught. If there had been a wound, though, we would have found such.”

“And what were the lad about, there in the stone ruins?”

“Sergeant Gart does tell me that they saw a light, a strange silver light, he did say.” Verrarc hesitated, thinking of lies, but Gart had doubtless told half the town by now. “It were the strangeness of the light that did make him send a man across. I do think that they were seeing fancies, myself. It be a long and lonely job, holding the winter watch.”

“Gart be a solid man, though. If he does say he saw a light, I believe him.”

“Oh, the light be real enough! What I’m finding hard to believe is this talk of strange silver witch lights.”

“Ah.” Admi nodded, sending his prodigious jowls dancing. “Now I do see your meaning.”

“I’ll be talking with every guard who went over to the armory. I told Gart to make sure they assembled at first light.”

“The armory? Gart told me they did find the lad in the stone ruins.”

“Was it now? Well, that’s another matter I’d best get clear.”

At the guardhouse by the gates, Gart and the other men who’d been on duty were waiting. When Verrarc opened the door, they stopped whatever they were doing and rose to greet him.

“Sit down, sit down all of you,” Verrarc said. “I’ll not be troubling you long.”

The others sat. Gart brought a stool over, which Verrarc placed at the head of the table. The guards watched him with eyes so weary he could assume they’d not slept all night.

“Very well,” Verrarc said. “Here be the tale as I heard it. There be a need on you all to tell me if I’ve heard wrong.”

They nodded, glancing back and forth among themselves.

“Early in the evening watch,” Verrarc went on, “Demet and Gart did stand upon the catwalks near the South Gate. They saw a strange silver light upon Citadel’s peak, near the armory. Demet rowed across alone and did go up the hill to see what it might be.”

The men nodded. Verrarc turned to Gart.

“You did say that Demet were a long time about it. And then his wife did come with his supper?”

“She did, Councilman,” Gart said. “And sore upset she was, too, when she did hear where her Demet had gone. So I did take one of the lads and went over to look for him.”

“But what made you decide to go look?”

“His poor woman, that’s what. Everyone knows there’s a touch of the witch about Niffa. She did fall into a faint, like, and then she began talking in this strange voice, babbling of Demet lying in the stone ruins. It were like she was up on the walls and looking down, telling me what did lie below where I could not see.”

Verrarc wondered if his blood were freezing in his veins, he felt so cold and sick.

“And what else did she tell you, Sergeant?”

“Naught. Just somewhat about the silver light and Demet lying so still on the ground.”

“She saw no one there, lurking in the shadows or suchlike?”

“Naught that she told me about.”

“Ah. Very well.” Verrarc felt his blood begin to thaw. “Well, poor Niffa’s off with Demet’s family, attending to his last journey. I’ll not be bothering the lass today.”

As the ancient custom demanded, Demet’s family took his body out to the forest to give it back to the gods who had let him wear it a little while. Niffa and Emla washed his body and laid it on a litter, then covered him with a blanket. The menfolk carried the litter out and laid it in the sledge, drawn by two heavy horses and driven by Werda, who was dressed in white fur robes, covered from head to toe in the spirit-color. As Demet’s widow, Niffa wrapped herself in a white cloak and walked behind the sledge when they set out. Behind her in a ragged procession came his family and hers.

In the high snow the journey was a hard morning’s trudge through a world turned to glittering rime by a cold sun. Even though she kept to the ruts that the sledge made, Niffa was sweating in the heavy cloak. She welcomed the discomfort and the effort; it blocked everything out of her mind but putting one foot after the other. Ahead of them down the river valley the pine forest loomed closer and darker with each mile, as if they approached the fortress of Lord Death himself. At the forest edge Werda clucked the horses to a halt. Emla and Niffa took the long knives she gave them and cut pine boughs to cover the body. The blanket they left in the sledge. Demet would return naked to the forest.

His brothers came forward. When they lifted the bier from the sledge, his father began to weep, the long sobs of a man unused to tears.

“Why did they not take me?” Cronin said. “Ai! How I wish I’d gone instead of him.”

Emla caught his arm. She still looked dazed, like a woman awakening from a hard fall.

“Don’t go questioning the gods,” Werda said, “nor be tempting them. Let us go among the holy trees.”

Lael and Kiel took the lead to beat a path through the snow, but the drifts lay so high among the bluish shadows of the trees that they gave up after barely half a mile.