The Wizard And The Warlord

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In horror, Sigurd saw the dark shape of the dead but reanimated wizard Vigbjodr blocking the doorway. Then the draug lurched forward on leaden feet, advancing on the bed where Sigurd lay. It advanced to the foot of the bed and looked down. Sigurd slowly shrank himself to the smallest iump possible, feeling like a rat in a trap.

The draug took another dragging step, and Sigurd felt it groping at the foot of the bed. Then it drew back with a rumbling growl.

Still muttering, it turned its eyes upon Sigurd. Two dull, red lights regarded him from a face that seemed more bone than flesh, with matted tufts of beard hanging down to the draug’s breast like strands of filthy wool. . .

Also by Elizabeth Boyer
Published by Ballantine Books
:

THE SWORD AND THE SATCHEL

THE ELVES AND THE OTTERSKIN

THE THRALL AND THE DRAGON’S HEART

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1983 by Elizabeth Boyer

All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-91149

ISBN 0-345-30711-9

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: August 1983

Cover art by Laurence Schwinger

Especially for Allan, who dreamed the Hross-Bjorn;
who continues to look for dreams,
and loves no walls but canyon walls.

The persistent rain began turning to snow. Sigurd sat on a mossy rock to glare down into the little valley where his grandmother’s house was disappearing behind veils of rain and mist. Since spring, he had been trying to expand the tiny hut into a fair-sized longhouse, but the weather had been wet all summer and he had no spirits for cutting turf in the rain. Morosely, he doubted if he would get the house finished before the fall freeze-up, particularly since both of his thralls had run away. They had been frightened by the talk that his grandmother Thorarna was a witch and was directing sendings against her neighbors to cause bad luck.

Sigurd scowled toward the lower valleys and the settlements. Old Bogmoddr, their nearest neighbor, had found a colt dead yesterday and loudly blamed Thorarna—and after living more than twenty years as her neighbor, since the time she had arrived at Thongullsfjord alone, except for a small, red-haired child. Sigurd himself had seen nothing to convince him that evil magic was plaguing his neighbors, and not just the usual bad luck that was certain to strike even the best of men. When the settlers of that remote bit of hospitable land came together, however, all they could talk about was cattle and sheep that had fallen to their deaths over cliffs or into fissures, driver mad by some supernatural force, or the milk and cheese in the dairies that had been fouled and spoiled by an envious spell. The fishing was worse than anyone could recall, and most damning of all the evidence against Thorarna was the weather, which remained damp and mizzling most of the summer so that the hay spoiled before it could dry; it never failed to rain directly after someone cut his hay. Thorarna was even reputed to have turned the land-vaettir against the settlements, as evinced by the great rat that had attacked the largest toe of Bera of Alfgrirnssynrsstead, shaking it with a fury most unnatural even in the fiercest of rats.

Thinking about his neighbors’ accusations made Sigurd hot with fury. No one wondered that a lone and very ancient little woman could accomplish such diverse tricks as inflicting chills and fevers at the farthest south holding, at the same instant drying up the milk of the cows twenty miles to the north. Neither did they question her ability to break the necks of fifteen sheep in one night or to gallop her horse over the roofs of distant neighbors from dusk to dawn without stopping once to rest. Sigurd suspected that someone was doing the mischief and afterward blaming it on Thorarna’s spells. Thorarna was nearer eighty than seventy, a gnomelike little creature so fragile of limb that Sigurd could lift her easily onto her horse, since she was no heavier than a child.