Wizardborn (13 page)

“He will not trust me,” Feykaald objected.

“He will if he believes that you are there against my will,” Raj Ahten said. He pulled out the gold message case, tossed it to Feykaald. “Tell him of the reavers in Kartish. Tell him that the Lord of the Underworld leads them. Say that you came to beg him to come to the aid of Indhopal.”

“You think he will come?” Feykaald asked.

“He will entertain the notion.”

“As you command, O Light of the World,” Feykaald said.

Raj Ahten wheeled the stallion, raced for Kartish.

   9   

I don't have a father. Like all Earth Wardens, I was born of the Earth.

—
The wizard Binnesman

As the slow light descended from heaven, spreading across the blasted fields thirty miles north of Carris, Myrrima asked Averan, “So, you know nothing more?”

“I've told you everything,” Averan said. She had told how she'd first met Roland Borenson, Myrrima's father-in-law, on the way to Carris, along with Baron Poll and the green woman. Averan had taken Myrrima up through the time that she'd left Roland and Baron Poll, only to be rescued by Myrrima's husband in company with Saffira. She told Myrrima how she'd helped Sir Borenson enter Carris to hunt for his father.

Averan could tell that her story hurt Myrrima.

In the back of the wagon, Sir Borenson slept deeply. A burning fever seemed ready to consume him. Myrrima had done all that she could for him last night. She'd applied balms from the healers, had poured libations of wine over him and whispered incantations to Water. They'd had to stay at Carris at night, for fear that they'd meet a reaver in the dark. But Myrrima had fled that foul place with her husband at the first crack of dawn, hoping that the king's wizard in Balington might heal him.

A force horse pulled the wagon, and the wheels nearly sang as they spun down the road through the deadlands.

Averan had secured a ride with Myrrima by claiming that
she had an “urgent message” for the king. But Averan had left out a few details in her story.

The sun had begun to rise far beyond the oak-covered hills, like a cold red eye. Averan squinted at it, then pulled her hooded robe over her face.

She didn't like the burning sensation that the sun caused. Her skin tingled at its touch. Her hands were itching, as if she'd handled poison ivy.

But she felt glad that she wasn't Borenson. Myrrima had pulled up his tunic, looked beneath his armor, and Averan had glimpsed how he'd been wounded.

The wound would have been ghastly under any circumstances, even if it hadn't gotten infected. Averan had had no idea that people could do that to one another.

“Myrrima,” Averan asked, “when you take the walnuts off a bull, he's called a ‘steer.' And when you take them off a stallion, he's a gelding. What do you call it when they take them off a man?”

“A eunuch,” Myrrima said. “Raj Ahten made a eunuch out of my husband.”

“Oh,” Averan said. “That means he can't have babies, right?”

Myrrima's dark eyes filled with water, and she bit at her lip. After a moment she said, “That's right. We can't have babies.”

Averan didn't dare ask another question. It was too painful for Myrrima.

“I saw how you cried over Roland,” Myrrima said.

“He's dead,” Averan said. “Everyone I know is dead: Roland and Brand and my mother.”

“I was at Longmot when the wight of Erden Geboren came,” Myrrima said. “He blew his warhorn, and men who had died that day rose up and joined him on the hunt. They were happy, Averan. Death isn't an ending. It's a new beginning. I'm sure that Roland is happy, wherever he is.”

Averan said nothing. She couldn't be sure what the dead felt.

“You didn't know him long,” Myrrima said, as if she should feel better because of it.

Averan shook her head. “He said—” She sniffled. “He said he was going to petition the duke, so that he could become my father. I've never had a father.”

Myrrima reached out and took Averan's hand. She looked in Averan's eyes and said, “If the duke had granted that petition, then I would have been your sister in-law.” Myrrima squeezed her hand. “I could still use another sister.”

Averan clenched her jaw, and tried to put on a bold face.

She trembled. Her guts were still cramped and twisted in terror. She'd fed on reaver brains last night, but she didn't dare tell Myrrima what she'd done. She didn't dare tell a stranger how the reaver's memories now haunted her.

Averan crawled off the buckboard, into the wagon, and curled up in the hay. The new hay smelled of sweet clover, fescue, and oat straw. She buried her face in it, but it could not keep out the memories.

In her mind's eye, Averan beheld an enormous reaver mage, stalking uphill through a windy cave. The image and smells came preternaturally clear, like a waking dream, or as if the memory were more real than the life that she lived.

Averan did not see the scene as a person would. Reavers have no eyes; instead, their philia sense life in ways she couldn't understand. To a reaver, living animals glowed in the darkness the way that lightning glows.

Now, Averan recalled the reaver mage glowing, speaking to her in scents. “Follow my trail.”

In memory, Averan had no choice but to follow. Yet she felt terrified, and knew that she was marching to a place where she didn't want to go. She detected scents in the air, the cries of reavers in supreme torment.

The philia near the One True Master's anus began excreting words, and Averan scuttled forward to taste them.

“Do not fear,” the One True Master said. “You smell pain, but you shall not be subjected to it. The Blood of the Faithful will be sweet to you.”

The image faded. Averan realized that she'd blacked out.

She must have slept for a few minutes, because her eyes felt more rested. But her stomach still hurt from eating so much. She clutched it.

Averan fought a dull sense of panic. She remembered snatches of what had happened next. She recalled forcibles and an incantation.

The One True Master had given her servant an endowment. But Averan couldn't figure out exactly which. Averan hadn't been able to eat much of the monster's brains—not even a tenth of them. She didn't know all that the mage had known, couldn't make much sense of most of the reaver's thoughts and memories.

And it was the things that she didn't know that scared Averan most.

She tried not to fret, held an image of the reaver in her mind, wondered why the reavers saw living creatures as if they glowed like lightning. Averan supposed that it was because there is lightning inside of people. On warm summer nights when clouds used to roll low over the graak's aerie at Keep Haberd, she'd pull off her wool blanket and see small flashes of light against her skin. Beastmaster Brand had said that it was because there was lightning inside her.

Averan lay down next to Sir Borenson and rested her head on her hand. She noticed some pale green things—roots—woven into her robe.

She pulled a couple off, threw them into the hay. It had been raining all night, so her robe had been wet and then gotten covered in seeds.

Now the seeds were sprouting. They were everywhere in her robe, like little green worms. She decided to pick them out later.

The wagon passed under a tree, and Averan saw the shadows of leaves. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of fields and hills.

She sat up excitedly. They'd left the deadlands! Her head
still ached. She squinted in the sunlight, pulled her robe close.

After a night of storm, the sun had surged into the sky, hurling splintered shafts of silver through broken clouds to dash against the emerald hillsides. The roosters at a nearby cottage celebrated by crowing as if it were the first sunrise in a month, and the whole land was filled with the cries of larks and the peeping of sparrows from under every bush.

To her left the round hills seemed to bow to the mountains. The night's rain had soaked into summer-dried grass and left the land smelling drenched and new. The leaves of maples and alders turning on the lower slopes made them shimmer in shades of scarlet, russet, and gold.

To the right, a silver stream wound through a stand of alders. White ducks gabbled as they fed along the stream banks downhill.

Ahead lay a village with thatch-roofed cottages squatting by the road. Honeysuckle and ivy trailed over the garden walls.

Everything here seemed so alive—everything but Sir Borenson. He had gone from pale to a feverish red. Sweat streamed from his forehead.

“Where are we?” Averan asked.

“Balington,” Myrrima said. “You've been asleep for more than an hour.”

Averan looked at the cottages. Yesterday, she'd been able to sense Gaborn's presence in battle. She'd seen the Earth King as a green flame that stood before her even when she closed her eyes. The Earth King was supposed to be here.

Now, she reached out with her feelings, tried to discern his location. But the flame had gone.

Still, there was something about Balington. She felt a power here, old and immense. She could not detect its center, could not tell if it meant her well or ill. She felt as if she were riding toward her destiny.

They drove into the village, past forty fine horses that stood all blanketed and barded outside the stables. Averan
spotted a wagon there with several burly guards hovering nearby—keeping watch over the king's treasure. It looked as if the king were getting ready to ride.

A village boy in leather pants, green smock, and feathered cap led a milk cow along the road. Cream leaked from her swollen udders.

Myrrima stopped long enough to ask the lad, “Where's the king's wizard?”

“Round the back,” he said, pointing toward the inn.

Myrrima drove the wagon to the back of the inn. She skirted a stone fence covered in jasmine and golden hop vines until she reached a wooden gate. She climbed down, unlatched it.

“Are you coming?” Myrrima asked. “You said you had a message for the king's ears only.”

Now that she was here, Averan felt uneasy about the ruse. She feared that if she told Gaborn her story, he would think her mad. A dull pain throbbed at the base of her skull.

She summoned her courage. “I'm coming.”

She hopped out of the wagon on stiff legs and entered the garden gate. Brown and white pigeons strutted atop the thatch of a dovecote, cooing softly. A gray squirrel went leaping up a nearby cherry tree, its tail floating behind.

Gaborn's Days stood at the top of the garden in a patch of sunlight. The skeletal scholar, with his close-cut hair and rust-colored robes, stood quietly with his hands clasped behind his back, merely observing.

The king himself sat on a stone beneath an almond tree in the midst of the garden. He wore a shirt of ring mail, as if for battle. Sweat darkened the quilted tunic beneath his arms, as if he had been doing heavy labor. But he merely talked. At least thirty knights surrounded him, all sitting on the grass in their finely burnished armor, the young squires with their bowl haircuts and rougher clothes lounging in the shadows beyond. Most of the lords hailed from Mystarria, but she saw some blank shields, and even a pair of Invincibles who had ripped off their surcoats so that they no longer wore the gold and crimson of Raj Ahten.