Master of Whitestorm (33 page)

The word he spoke was not in the language of mortals, but the stud understood. His ears swept back, and his head jerked; the rider in his saddle stayed astride.

“So then, he did not abuse thee,” concluded the enchanter. He shrugged back his hood and scowled at the black-clad, bronze-haired mortal who remained mounted by the sole volition of the gray.

“Fool and daughter of foolishness,” the old one snapped. He stepped to the stallion’s shoulder and laid his palm on Korendir’s damp forehead. As the breeze off the lake stirred through his beard, the ancient tilted his head back and raised his voice in song.

The fog which mantled the mercenary’s form hissed protest. Song and spell-wrought sorceries collided in dissonance, and raised a sound like water-splashed embers. The glimmer of energies flared bright, and Korendir stiffened. His limbs flinched and shuddered, and he gasped like a tear in cloth.

The old man’s chant did not falter. He raised his other hand and cradled the mercenary’s brow. With his wrists half buried in bronze hair, he finished each phrase of melody in a voice that stayed crisp and well-pitched. The notes resonated through the morning stillness and slowly, finally, wrought change. Evil leached out of the mist that bound Korendir. Faded and insubstantial as smoke, Majaxin’s curse of vengeance wisped away and dispersed in the sunlight.

The enchanter sang one line more, and Korendir fell slack as a gutted fish. Sure hands caught his fall as he spilled from the stallion’s saddle.

“Fire and earth, I’m too old for this,” the wizard grunted. He shouldered the mercenary’s weight so that half of him rested on the horse and called out a guttural name.

The tower gate cracked open. An eye appeared behind, all wrinkles and merriness, and black as an unplanted seed. “He’s alive, that one?” a raspy voice called back.

“Neth.” The ancient returned a nettled glance. “Would I bother supporting a corpse? Get your short bones over here before I drop him altogether.”

The door gaped wider. A stocky dwarf in a red cap and jerkin bounced out and rushed to assist.

Small the fellow might have been, but the muscles under his gathered sleeves were gnarled like the trunk of an oak. He bore Korendir up with an ease much belied by his colorful string of curses. After an anxious glance at the horse, the dwarf stumped with the man back across the glen toward the tower.

The wizard watched the mercenary’s trailing heels carve grooves in the sand by the entry. Unsmiling, he twitched his sleeves straight on his wrists. Although he disdained a groom’s chores, he loosened the stallion’s girths. He removed both saddle and bridle, then slapped a palm on sweat-sleeked hide. “Go, you,” he murmured to the horse’s back-turned ear. “Roll in damp grass all you wish, for you at least are blameless. Your part in this unpleasantness was well and bravely done.”

* * *

The dwarf untangled his grip from a sweated mat of bronze hair, tripped the latch, and kicked open the last of three iron-bound doors. Still huffing from his ascent of steep stairs, he said, “Your man has arrived.”

Within a shadowed alcove, Ithariel stirred, but did not look around. Recently changed to a leather tunic and hose cross-gartered for riding, she twisted her hands through the strands of pearls which girdled her waist. “Is he alive?”

“If he wasn’t I wouldn’t be packing him, would I?” The dwarf shuffled in and dumped the torso of his burden with a thump on Ithariel’s best divan. As an afterthought, he lifted the man’s ankles and arranged the long legs on the cushions. The boots were rain-wet, and the leather smelled pungently of horse.

The dwarf reviewed his handiwork with his head cocked to one side. Then, as if scratched and bleeding men on his mistress’s brocades were commonplace as gardening, he straightened his cap over his black hair and added, “Archmaster’s madder than Neth was on the day the dark spoiled His creation.”

Ithariel fumbled, and pearls spilled with a clatter through her fingers. “Now whose fault is that, Nix?” She chose a nickname, since the one given by the dwarf’s mother was ridiculously difficult to pronounce. “I sent no word to Dethmark.”

The dwarf shrugged, his cheeks puffed out like autumn apples. “You think he’s deaf, Lady? I know better, I do indeed. When the whole of Tir Amindel gets razed by sorceries, and the Archmaster doesn’t hear, then Neth almighty’d better worry. The breaking of Majaxin’s tallix disrupted continuity clear through to Alhaerie.”

“Oh, you should earn your keep by telling tales in the taverns!” Ithariel snapped in exasperation. “Now will you leave, or must I throw you head first through the casement?”

The dwarf considered her with acute and guileful eyes. “I see,” he observed quietly. He poked a stubby finger into his cheek. “One half-dead mortal means so much to you, does he?” And he spun through the doorway as Ithariel pitched a vase at him.

The crystal smashed harmlessly into panels of fast-closing oak. “Lady,” admonished the dwarf from the far side, “like it or not, you have company.”

The portal reopened immediately. The Archmaster of the White Circle stepped briskly across the threshold, his expression bleak as a thundercloud. He took in broken fragments and the spray of strewn flowers, and then Ithariel’s white face. He gave both their correct interpretation. An anger of chilling proportions settled over his features, and he shoved the door to with a thud that rattled the hinges.

“You learned nothing, I think, in the years you spent as my ward.”

Ithariel raised her chin. “I learned the extent of my father’s evil.”

“Your present folly matches that.” The Archmaster’s eyes turned pitiless as the shadowed side of a snowdrift. “What misguided instinct gave you the right to meddle with a problem too great for your seniormost peers? And was Tir Amindel’s utter destruction not enough that you must risk entangling your life with that of a mortal man?”

“He is Korendir of Whitestorm,” Ithariel said. “And far less mortal than he seems.”

She crossed the chamber and knelt by the divan where her mercenary lay. The vibrant inner tension she remembered was absent, stilled now by enchanted sleep. Shallow gashes marred his face and hands. At his throat, the tarnished length of chain that once held her jewel of protection had seared a line of blisters across his collarbone.

The Archmaster moved to stand at the shoulder of his ward; he, too, studied Korendir, but with less sympathy. “You repeat the failings of your father, Ithariel,” he cautioned. “You reach for what you want without any thought for consequences. When you called this man into service, did you think what penalty he might pay?”

Ithariel stroked the limp fingers, felt sword scars and calluses from the bridle rein. “He was brought up on suffering. Never has it proven his master.”

“The scourge of Majaxin’s crystal might be abided, true enough, but at what cost?” The archmaster shook his head in sudden sorrow. “The mind I just set under spell has ranged so far from reason that only the immortal maker might call it back.”

Ithariel closed her hands around Korendir’s sinewed wrist. “Neth and his angels won’t be necessary. This man is one of ours, the lost heir of High Morien. As a baby he was spirited away before the demons overran Alathir. The servant who bore him later sickened and died of a fever, but the infant survived. He was found in the forest, half starved, by the widow of Shan Rannok’s huntsman.”

“And you risked his life in Tir Amindel,
knowing this?”
The Archmaster’s ire intensified. “Girl, I saw perfectly well whom I dragged off the back of Nixdaxdimo’s prize stallion! Orame informed me that Morien’s son had not died, years back. But this boy’s life cannot be sheltered by any grace of inheritance. Think, child! If Korendir discovers his bloodline, how long do you think he will last? The Mathcek Demons lurk yet in Alathir’s ruins. As Morien’s heir, they would hunt and destroy him, and not a ward the White Circle could devise might keep him safe.”

“Are you saying he should have finished his days as a mortal?” Ithariel stood up heatedly.

“Oh yes, Ithariel. Just that!” The Archmaster spun away with a swirl of sea-colored robes. “Morien’s son should have been left to find happiness and marriage as others do.”

“Just what sort of life do you think he led?” Sure of her ground now, Ithariel shouted back. “Did you, or Orame, ever take time to know him?”

The Archmaster paused by the doorway. He heard the pain in her outburst, but his manner stayed critical as flint. “That point is moot, foster daughter. Now hear what your actions will bring. Korendir of Whitestorm shall live out his natural days within the wardspell I have set. You will care for him as he sleeps. He will not be wakened into suffering, and if you think to spare him by granting him knowledge of his origins, the Council Major will be forced to cast judgment. Do not meddle with this man further, Lady. Or on my authority as Archmaster, I will sentence you to the same fate as your father.”

Ithariel went white to the lips. Auburn hair spilled in coils over her jerkin as she sank back and laid her cheek against Korendir. Her thoughts circled in turmoil, and she barely heard the door swing closed as the Archmaster left her presence.

The dwarf Nixdaxdimo found her still by the mercenary’s side when he returned from grooming the gray. He paused on the threshold, scraped his knuckles through a beard like tangled wire, then shut the door and sat with his back against the lintel. For a very long while he watched the tears trace down his mistress’s cheeks and soak soundlessly into black wool.

Finally he said, “Ach, lady, you should never have mixed your heart into this.”

Ithariel did not answer.

The dwarf propped his chin on his fist and tried again. “It’s my fault, too, remember? I was the one who gave the sword and the stallion to tempt yon man into service.”

Her fingers tightened in the cloth of Korendir’s tunic; beyond that, she might not have heard.

Nixdaxdimo’s virtues did not encompass patience. He raised bushy eyebrows and stamped back onto his feet. “Gives me the sorrows, just looking at you. When you’ve had your fill of moaning over him, I’ll come back.”

Ithariel raised her head and said something too low to hear.

The dwarf folded muscled forearms and scowled. “Say that louder.”

“Get out,” Ithariel repeated more succinctly, and with a grunt of disgust, the dwarf did.

Left to herself, the enchantress looked down upon a face unrecognizable in tranquillity. The almost ferocious reserve that pervaded the man’s conscious presence was banished completely in sleep; that more than anything reminded of violated trust. Korendir had never owned such peace in life. The irony wounded, that the wardstone she had promised, that he had earned at such annihilating cost, might itself bring the key to his inner calm. Granted his most cherished desire, the Korendir who had ceded his past to her would have struggled to reconcile the conflicting passions that drove him. Allowed protection for his stronghold at Whitestorm, he would surely take his chance to win recovery.

A lock of his hair had fallen and tangled in eyelashes that showed not a flicker of reflex; Ithariel smoothed the strands back. Only warm skin, and the steady strength of his heartbeat, established the assurance that he lived. The enchantress tried to imagine the future, as bright bronze hair slowly grayed. Scars and calluses and tan would fade away, while the face with its stern planes and angles would sag into characterless old age.

Insanity would have been easier to endure.

In its place, the passive sleep imposed by the Archmaster offered a penalty too severe for acceptance. That final, dispassionate judgment drove Ithariel down an avenue of alienated thought. The discovery at the end left her shaking. When Korendir’s mind had been stilled, something irreplaceable had been lost. A thing was reft from her that years and grief could not forgive, nor any amount of pity console.

Who else upon Aerith understood those most terrible personal memories he had bequeathed her?

Ithariel cradled a hand that would never touch back. She kissed lips unequivocally deprived of feeling, and something inside her gave way.

“There’s another means to recall a mind from madness,” she said aloud.

That moment the door banged open. Intrusive as a plague of stinging insects, Nixdaxdimo burst in. “Almighty powers of creation, I was afraid you’d think of that!”

Ithariel shot up straight as if slapped. “You interfering little pest! What are you talking about?”

The dwarf advanced on bandy legs and stopped beyond reach of his mistress. “If—” he said succinctly. He paused, took a deep breath, then mastered the rest in a rush. “If I thought you’d ever get soft-headed enough to take a mate, I’d never have asked Megga to marry me.”

Ithariel returned a dubious frown. “Let Megga hear that, and you’ll walk in the same boots you stand in.”

Nix solemnly regarded his feet, whose footgear wanted mending. “Well then, I’ll thank you not to tell the old battle axe.” Still staring at his toes he added, “All the same, you’d better not bond with that carrot-headed madman on your divan.”

Ithariel raised her brows in a manner not at all to the dwarfs liking. He hopped from one foot to the other and pulled his beard with both hands. “I knew it! You’re serious. Oh Neth, but I knew it! Lady, on that score the Archmaster was very clear. You’re making a terrible mistake.”

Now the enchantress returned a glare. “You rotten little pest. How dare you discuss my affairs, particularly ones that this moment are purest conjecture?”

“Conjecture!” Nix ripped his hat off and threw it on the floor. “I like that! Lady, the Archmaster himself broached the subject. He saw the same stupid look on your face that I did. If you mistook him for deaf this morning, he sure wasn’t blind this afternoon.”

Ithariel raked her fingers through her hair. Her gut was twisted into cramps, and her back ached from hours of sitting without a chair. “If I choose to mate, not even the council at Dethmark can forbid me.”

Nix wilted. He sat down heavily on the crown of his feathered hat and said, “No. But you’re making a ridiculous choice.” When Ithariel failed to respond, he set his elbows on the floor and rested his chin in his palms. “All hells. Telvallind Archmaster himself admitted you have the right. He just hoped you’d have better sense. Since you don’t, he said to tell you that if the man Whitestorm will have you, and if you both survive, the White Circle has no choice but to disown you. And if the mortal refuses you, if he lives or dies insane, the council will pass judgment against you.”