The Door Into Fire (3 page)

“That’s so… Have you got food?”

“Plenty.” Herewiss dropped the book in his saddlebag, along with another that already lay on the bed. The ornate carving of bed and paneling and windows was lost in evening dark, and only an occasional warm highlight showed in the light of the single oil lamp on the bedside table. “I cleaned out the pantry. I have enough trail food to last me through four years of famine, and I ate a big dinner.” He went over to a chest, lifted the lid and took out a white surcoat emblazoned with the arms of the Brightwood: golden Phoenix rising from red flame, the third-oldest arms in the Kingdoms. “Should I take this, do you think?”

“Is there some formal occasion out in the wilds that you’re planning to attend?”

“No. But if I need to exert political pull, it might come in handy.”

“You could take my signet.”

“What if I lost it? That’s almost the oldest thing in the Wood; I’d never forgive myself if something happened to it. No, hang on to it. The surcoat should be enough—the device could be counterfeited, but the gold in the embroidery’s real.” He folded up the surcoat, stowed it in the saddlebag.

“Do you want some mail?”

“No. I’m going to travel light so I can move fast. Besides, why bother giving anyone the idea that I might be worth robbing? I’ve got that damn turtle-shell of a leather corselet, and I have plenty of padding, and that nice light Masterforge knife you gave me last Opening Night. And the spear; and the cloak is good and thick— Anybody who gets past all that probably deserves to kill me…and if they do, it’ll prove that you and Mard were wasting your talents on me these sixteen years.” Herewiss stood up straight from checking his bags. “Besides, I inherited your iron britches. Don’t worry so much.”

Hearn looked with concern at his son. Clothed in dark tunic and breeches and riding boots, cloaked in brown, Herewiss seemed one more shadow of the many in the room. The lamplight reflected from his eyes, and from the metal fittings of the empty scabbard hanging from his belt. “Son,” Hearn said, “I’m not too worried about you. But the pattern that’s been forming bothers me. I worry about Freelorn. Not so much the fact that he’s been running around the Kingdoms like a crazy person for the past six years, staying at petty kings’ courts until someone finds out he’s there and tries to poison him. He’s pretty alert about such things, usually. Or the business of his running around with his little swordtail and stealing for a living. He seems to steal from people who need it. But lately he’s been coming to grief a bit too often, just missing getting caught—and you’ve been having to go and get him out of these scrapes. And now this; here he is, stuck in this old keep with a thousand Steldenes waiting to starve him out—and
you’re
going to go get him out of it. Alone. Herewiss, it’s not really safe.”

“I’ll manage,” Herewiss said. “What are you thinking, father?”

“This. What happens when he gets into something that you can’t get him out of?”

“By then I hope I’ll have my Power…”

“But you don’t have it yet, and if you get killed for Freelorn’s sake, you never will. Son of mine—” and Herewiss’s underhearing brought him a sudden wash of his father’s sorrow, a feeling like eyes filling with tears— “I’ve long since reconciled myself to the fact that you’re going to die young—by use of the Flame, or more slowly by all this sorcery. Yet I want you to be what you can. Here you are, the first male in an age and a half to have even the small amount of Fire you have—the first sign that the Kingdoms are getting back to the way things were before the Catastrophe. But you have to live to be what you can. At least for a little longer. And Freelorn is endangering you.”

“Father,” Herewiss said very softly, “what good is the Power to me if Lorn dies? He’s the only thing I need as much as the Flame. Life would be empty without him; the Fire would mean nothing to me. There
are
priorities.”

“Is your life one of them?”

Herewiss reached out, took his father’s hands in his. “Da, listen. I won’t follow Lorn into any of his famous last stands or impossible charges. I’ll try not to let him get into them. I’d like to see him king, yes—but I won’t let him drag me into some crazy scheme that has a dead Dragon’s chance against the Dark of succeeding. However, I also won’t let him get killed if there’s any way I can help it—and if my life is the price of his continuing, well, there it is. I can’t help how I feel.”

Hearn sighed softly. “You’re a lot like your brother,” he said, “and just as hard to reason with. I gave you the oak as your tree at your birth, my son, and sometimes I think your head is made of it…”

“It was a good choice,” Herewiss said, smiling faintly. “Lightning strikes oak trees more than any other kind. And I have to be crazy sometimes: I have a reputation to uphold. ‘The only thing sure about the Lords’ line of the Wood—’”

“‘—is that there’s nothing sure about them,’” his father finished, smiling too. “Fool.”

“They told Earn our Father that He was a fool at Bluepeak, and look what happened to Him.”

“I would sooner be father to a live son,” Hearn said, “than to a dead legend.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Herewiss.

“Have a safe journey, then. And good hunting.”

•

So Herewiss had taken his leave of his other relatives and friends in the Woodward, and had said good-bye to the Rooftree, and then had stopped in the stable to choose a horse. He had originally been of a mind to take Darrafed, his little thoroughbred Arlene mare, a present from Freelorn—or perhaps Shag, his father’s curly-coated bay warhorse. But as he had walked down the aisle between the stalls, Dapple had put his head out over his stall’s half-door and looked at Herewiss as if he knew something. Herewiss was not one to ignore a sign when it presented itself.

The horse moved comfortably through the low hill country. As long as he kept to a steady southward course, Herewiss let Dapple have his head. The horse was a wise one. About a hundred years before, a Rodmistress had put her deathword on one of Dapple’s ancestors and had decreed that the horses of that line would always have a talent for being in the right place at the right time. The talent had seemed to do their riders good as well. One horse, the third generation down, had carried an unsuspecting lady to the arms of the lover who had searched the Middle Kingdoms for her for twelve years. Another had led its thirteen-year-old mistress to the place where the royal Darthene sword, Fórlennh BrokenBlade, had been hidden during the Reavers’ invasion of Darthis City. Having Dapple along, Herewiss reasoned, would make his father worry less—and might incidentally ease his way as he worked on getting Freelorn out of that keep.

For three days he had been riding through empty land. It was not bare—Spring had run crazy through the fields, as if drunk on rose wine, flinging wildflowers and garlands of new greenery about with inebriated extravagance. The hills were ablaze with suncandle and Goddess’s-delight, tall yellow Lovers’-cup lilies and heartheal. Butterwort and red and blue never-say-die clambered up the gullies toward the hillcrests, and white mooneyes covered the ground almost everywhere that grass did not. But there were no people, no homesteads. For one thing, the land was poor for farming. For another, that part of the country was full of Fyrd.

The Fyrd had always been in the Kingdoms. They were said to be children of the Shadow, sent by Him to spread death and misery in the Goddess’s despite: or even creations of the Dark itself, changed things which had been made from normal animals when the Dark still covered the world. Whatever the case, most of North Darthen was still full of the major Fyrd species—horwolves, nadders, keplian, lathfliers, maws, and destreth. In Herewiss’s time, the land around the Wood was free of them, kept that way by constant use of the Power and the cold-eyed accuracy of Brightwood archers. But outside the Wood’s environs the Fyrd raided constantly, taking great numbers of livestock, and also men when they could get them. Sheep were pastured here in the hill country, but all the shepherds came up together after the Maiden’s Day feasts. Both flocks and men stood a better chance in large numbers.

The hills were thinning out now, and farms were slowly beginning to appear. They became more frequent as Herewiss and Dapple descended into the lowlands, and one very large farm with stone markers at its boundaries indicated that Herewiss was close to the town he had been expecting to reach that evening. The farm was the holding of a prominent Darthene house, the Lords Arian. He could have stopped there and received excellent hospitality, being after all the next thing to a prince; but attention drawn to himself was the last thing he wanted at this point.

He rode on down from the hills, crossing a rude stone bridge over the Kearint, a minor tributary of the river Darst, and came to the forty-house town of Havering Slides just as dusk was falling. Most of the people who lived there were hands on the big Arian farm. Herewiss rode up to the gate in the wooden palisade around the town, identified himself and was admitted without question.

The inn was as he had remembered it from earlier visits, a motley-looking place with a disjointed feeling to it; new buildings ran headlong into old ones, and afterthought second storeys sagged on their supports over uneasy-looking bay windows. It seemed that some of the artisans who had done carving work in the Woodward had also passed this way. The gutterspouts were fashioned into panting hound-faces and singing frogs; crows stealing cheese in their wooden beaks leered down from the cupolas.

Herewiss rode up to the stable door and handed Dapple over to the girl in charge. As he strode toward the doorway of the inn, his saddlebags slung over his shoulder, he was greeted by the sudden and beautiful odor of roast beef. After three days of nourishing but tasteless journey rations, the prospect of real food seemed almost an embarrassment of luxury. He paused at the door just long enough to admire the carving over it, a cross-grain bas-relief of a local Rodmistress casting the Shadow out of a possessed cow.

Herewiss pushed open the door and went in. It took his eyes a few minutes to get used to the dim interior of the place, though there were oil lamps all around. He was standing in a fairly large common room crowded with tables and chairs and long trestled benches. The room was not too full, it still being early in the evening. Several patrons sat about a table, dicing for coppers, and off in one corner a hulking farmer was devouring a steak pie in great mouthfuls.

The steak pie particularly interested Herewiss. Bags in hand, he went to the kitchen door, which was carved with dancing poultry, and knocked.

The door opened, and the innkeeper looked out at him cordially. She was a tall slender woman, gray-haired but pretty, in a brown robe and a long stained apron. “Can I help you, sir?” she said, wiping her hands on a dirty gray towel.

“Madam,” Herewiss said, bowing slightly, “food and lodging for the night for myself and my horse would do nicely.”

“Half an eagle,” the innkeeper said, looking at his clothes, which were in good repair.

“A quarter,” said Herewiss, smiling his most charming smile at her.

She smiled back at him. “A quarter eagle and three pence.”

“Two.”

The innkeeper smiled more broadly. “Two it is. Your horse is inside?”

“He is, madam.”

“Dinner?”

“Oh,
ye
s,” Herewiss said. The good smells coming out of the kitchen were making his stomach talk. “Some of what that gentleman is having, if there’s another one...”

She nodded. “Anything to drink? We have wine, red and white and Delann yellow; brown and black ale; and my husband made a fresh barrel of Knight’s Downfall yesterday.”

“Ale sounds good: the black. Which room should I take?”

“Up the stairs, turn right, third door to your left.” The innkeeper disappeared back into the kitchen’s steam.

Herewiss hurried up the creaking stairs and found the room in question. It was predictably musty, and the floor groaned under him. The shutters screeched in protest when he levered them open to let the sunset in, but he was so glad to have a hot meal in the offing that the place looked as good as any king’s castle to him. He dropped his bag in the corner, under the window, and changed into another clean dark tunic; then headed for the door. Halfway through the doorway, an afterthought struck him. He raised his hands to draw the appropriate gestures in the air, and since no one was near, spoke aloud the words of a very minor binding, erecting a lockshield around his bags. Then down the stairs he went.

Herewiss sat down at an empty table in a corner and spent a few moments admiring the window nearest him, which was a crazy amalgam of bottle-glass panes and stained vignettes. One of them, done in vivid shades of rose, cobalt, and emerald, showed the end of the old story about the man who fooled the Goddess into lifting her skirts by confronting Her with an illusion-river. There he lay under the trees at Harvest festival, inextricably stuck to and into an illusionary lover, while the Goddess and the harvesters stood around and laughed themselves weak. The man looked understandably mortified, and very chastened. He had been very lucky that he’d played his trick on the Mother aspect of the Goddess; had She been manifesting as the Maiden at the time, She might not have been so kind. The Mother tends to be forgiving of Her children’s pranks, but the Maiden can be fatally jealous of Her modesty.

Someone blocked the light, and Herewiss looked up. Before him stood a girl of perhaps eighteen years, pretty in a bland sort of way, with a droopy halo of frizzing black hair. She bent in front of Herewiss, putting his steak pie and ale on the old scarred table. Herewiss took brief disinterested notice of the view down her blouse, but much more of his attention was on the steak pie.