Master of Whitestorm (34 page)

Ithariel leaned her head against Korendir’s black-clad shoulder. All of her fury drained away, and her eyes went soft with distance.

“Oh, weep for an early frost,” said Nix, disconsolate. “Megga and I shall end up housekeeping an empty tower, and without any regular exercise that stallion will make shreds of the garden.”

“Maybe,” Ithariel returned. Very quietly she added, “Maybe you and Megga will do your sweeping and cooking in the hall at Whitestorm castle, and the stallion will be muscled fit to kill.”

Nixdaxdemo raised two fingers and bent his ears down. “Surely not.” His words rang pessimistically glum. “Hates the sea, anyway, Megga does. Says salt winds bring her headaches.”

“Liar,” Ithariel said faintly. After that, she did not move for what seemed an eternity of time.

XIX

WHITESTORM’S LADY

THE DWARF
Nixdaxdimo moped throughout the morning. As Ithariel fussed over elaborate preparations, she tripped over him twice, he hung so closely underfoot. Irked by the insults she received concerning clumsiness, the lady sent the dwarf out to bridle the gray for an errand in the ruins of Tir Amindel.

“Go and recover the fragments of Majaxin’s tallix,” she instructed her surly servant. “And be careful of that horse, he’s no longer yours.”

Nix perched astride a saddle whose flaps and assorted trappings chafed his ankles. His diminutive proportions made any use of stirrups impossible, and after much grousing, he removed the irons and thrust his feet through the empty leathers; he stayed astride by dint of two fists clenched tight in the blond mane. He might have bred and raised the mount he had provided Ithariel’s mercenary, but like most dwarves, his admiration for horseflesh was aesthetic and did not extend to riding. Anything higher than a pony made him dizzy. “Be careful of my head, you mean.” Nix returned a scowl. “A fall would smash all my bones.”

Ithariel turned the stud and smacked it into a trot toward the forest. “Be gone, you silly dwarf. You’ve tumbled off your bench drunk with ale too many times for me to think that any part of you is breakable.”

Nix howled a curse at her. He hauled without success on the gray’s reins and vanished precipitously into the forest. Only his voice drifted back: “Bother and hell’s demons, why didn’t I choose to breed fish?”

Alone in the glen before her tower, Ithariel felt the smile fade from her face. The ritual she had decided to attempt was never a step taken lightly. She knew apprehension, and fear, and self-doubt, but not regret. Each hour that passed confirmed that her choice had been foregone conclusion from the first. The man who lay sleeping in her tower was entangled in her life course; the absence of his conscious presence haunted her in a manner that had nothing at all to do with debt. For a White Circle initiate, that state of affairs offered few alternatives.

Either she chose to bond, to twine her being with his in a manner irreversibly final, or she lived out her days with the knowledge she was only half alive.

The Archmaster’s warning was a just one; the joining of two living spirits should never be consummated in duty. This was no moment for uncertainties, and yet Ithariel’s thoughts were torn with them. Korendir of Whitestorm might reject her. He might succumb to his madness, or he might sicken and die; in all cases, without redress, her fate would be tied to his own.

Preoccupied with worries, Ithariel took no joy from the spring that quickened the forest, but returned to her tower and exchanged her girdle of pearls for a knotted leather belt. Then she fetched a basket from the kitchen, went out, and launched her painted boat upon the lake. She paddled to the meadows on the far shoreline and spent the day gathering roots, rare flowers, and herbs. When the swallows swooped down and chattered questions at her, she did not answer back; their aerial acrobatics for once failed to delight her. The lake sprite did not surface to share her berries and bread, nor did she eddy the water into ripples around the painted boat’s keel when Ithariel ferried the laden basket homeward.

Only one being within the enchantress’s circle of influence remained impervious to her mood. The dwarf wife Megga awaited her mistress on the path before the front door. She had red cheeks and round fat arms, and hair like straw tied back under a polka dot shawl. “You left all the sausage I made, foolish girl. What man will have you if you’re falling down hungry, and skinny as well?”

Ithariel stopped. She switched her basket from her left hand to her right. “I’m not the only one who’s distraught. Have you forgotten? Megga, I never eat sausage.”

The dwarf woman slapped her ample thighs. “Ach, So ye don’t. But that’s no excuse.” She strutted back into the tower with a comical, rolling gait, her head turned sidewards in annoyance. “Sausage was for Nixdax, and he’s off his feed because of you.”

“Well, I’m guilty then, and there’s an end of it.” Ithariel laughed; she could not help herself. The dwarves always messed up her priorities; nothing she tried ever stopped them. She flicked pollen out of the trailing ends of her hair and followed Megga inside.

“That swordsman might be hungry when he’s roused,” Megga added hopefully.

The thought of Korendir wakened inspired only dread; Ithariel firmly kept to practicality. With a tact acquired through years of dwarvish service, she seized upon her opening. “Then you’ll help me get him moved.”

Megga shot a black look over her shoulder. “What’s the hurry, mistress? His boots have already spoiled your best cushions.”

“Nix’s doing, and proud he was of the feat, at the time.” Ithariel dodged as the dwarf wife sailed into a jibe in the passage. The enchantress caught the plump finger which jabbed scoldingly at her middle and thrust it more usefully through the handle of the herb basket. “Let be, Megga. If I’m going to bond with a mercenary, I doubt velvet cushions will very long stay a priority.”

* * *

Sundown splashed mottled light through the forest surrounding Ithariel’s tower by the hour Nixdaxdimo returned. He had not hurried on his errand. The gray he turned loose to graze showed a coat unmarred by sweat, but the same could not be said of his rider. Weary, pale, and lacking his habitual ebullience, he dragged his way up the stair. Ithariel’s living quarters stood empty; unsurprised, but disappointed nonetheless, the dwarf jammed his cap more firmly over his ears and tackled the next flight of steps.

His mistress was busy in the topmost chamber, the one she used for magic. Megga attended her; reluctantly, as Nix could see by the set of his wife’s lower lip. Given another reason to wish he had not come home, the dwarf sat heavily on the threshold.

Ithariel no longer wore her leather doublet and riding boots. Barefoot, robed in shimmering green samite, she traced runes in sand upon the floor with a small wooden paddle and a cone with a hole in one end. Nix took stock of the patterns already configured on black stone; the braziers with their bundles of aromatic herbs set up, but unlit, at the major and minor points of the compass. Centered in the circle lay the mercenary from Whitestorm, his clothing replaced by a pearlescent veiling of silk. Nixdaxdimo looked at the combed bronze hair, the closed eyes, and the spell-wrought stillness of the man’s features. Then the dwarf stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and shivered in outright apprehension. No good could come of this. No good at all.

That moment Ithariel looked up, and eyes as clear as sheet silver caught sight of him. “Nix. Did you bring the thing I asked for?”

The dwarf stopped chewing his fingers. He pulled off his cap, which was weighted inside with something heavy, and lowered it with a clink to the floor. “Here.” He met his mistress’s gaze with visible unhappiness. “Lady, the Archmaster was not wrong. Let the Master of Whitestorm bide his days in sleep.”

Ithariel frowned. “Nix, don’t make things difficult. I can’t do that.” She rose with a slither of robes, detoured around her spell patterns and knelt before her troubled servant. “Did something in Tir Amindel frighten you?”

Miserably the dwarf shook his head. Words could not encompass the ruins he had crossed: the fallen, shattered towers, with attendant tangles of wadded cloth and broken flesh now picked at by scavengers. The aftermath of the cataclysm unleashed by Majaxin’s tallix was a sight to wrack the mind with nightmares. That the man responsible had not whipped a certain stallion bloody through his frenzy of tortured flight defied credibility. Newly appreciative of the mercenary he had dumped on Ithariel’s best divan, Nixdaxdimo forced courage and spoke.

“If you have any pity at all, you’ll leave Korendir his peace.” The dwarf finished off with a look bleak enough to curdle milk.

Ithariel returned pure exasperation. “You too! Nix, you faithless scoundrel, I’m going to let Megga have her way. She’ll march you downstairs to eat sausage and then scold the ears off your head.”

The dwarf declined to retort, which was unusual. He reached out, hooked two workmanlike fingers and upended his scarlet cap. Three shards of crystal slithered out, black as the pits of hell, and faceted on those sides not crazed with fractures. One was the size of a doubled fist, and polished flat on the top. “On your head lie the consequences, then, Lady of the Forest.”

Nix rose, snapped for Megga to follow, and stamped off down the stair.

“He’s worried for you, that’s what!” The dwarf wife admonished as she passed her mistress. “And he’s right, if I may say so. Lady, why won’t you listen?”

Ithariel glanced aside at a face that reposed in a frame of dark bronze hair, at stilled hands that were made for life and action, and much too fine for the sword. “That’s why, little mother. Now leave me.”

Megga rustled off, grumbling imprecations. By herself in a chamber gone gloomy with twilight, Ithariel buried her face in her hands and sighed. The dwarves were wise in their way, and loyal to the bottom of their cantankerous little hearts. They knew, even better than she did: the Archmaster’s chosen course was merciful, and founded upon centuries of experience. And yet she could not abide. Terrible as the penalty would be if she failed, still, she could not look upon the sleeping man without a burning wild urge to rebel.

Madness, even death, was surely preferable to the passive oblivion of forgetfulness.

The enchantress’s hands shook as she reached down and examined the crystals recovered from Tir Amindel. No cloudy lights stirred in their depths, and no trace of power lingered to spark at her touch; the darkness in the stones was complete. Majaxin’s evil wards had drained away and left these tallix stilled as pools under starlight.

No gain would come by waiting. Ithariel selected the largest of the fragments. She carried it to the window, and seated herself with the stone a cold weight between her knees.

She began with the things she most loved. As evening deepened about her, she gathered the peace of her forest into a core of bright force, then sang that essence as a note. The sound struck the tallix and generated answering resonance. Ithariel felt a brief vibration sting her skin. Then the crystal sheared; one fragment cleaved away and left a clean and shining facet on the jaggedly broken edge.

Ithariel drew breath and encompassed the tranquillity of bird songs at daybreak. She shaped a second note, and another chip spun away; she sang of the watersprite’s laughter, and the dip of nesting swallows, and the smell of meadow flowers at summer noon. She added the abiding strength of rock, and the patience of oaks, and the warmth of her fires during snowstorms. Each spell song chiseled a new facet, and slowly the light rekindled in the tallix stone’s shady depths.

Below, ruddied by lantern flame in the tower’s snug kitchen, Megga and Nix heard the notes which would repulse armies, and the notes which would quiet ocean gales. They knew what their mistress sang into being was a wardstone for the holdfast at Whitestorm, and their eyes met in aggrieved consternation over a plate of untouched sausage.

“I should never have given her the stallion,” Nix said with recrimination. “Nor forged that black sword either.”

Megga untied her shawl and twisted its length between her fingers. “You’re a fool to think that made any difference. She’s headstrong, our mistress, and ruled by contrary passions. If that carrot-headed swordsman has the sense Neth gave to a chicken, he’ll choose insanity before he takes her to wife.”

Nix did not answer, but brooded as his thoughts turned upon a single fact: the gray stud had borne no mark of abuse beyond exhaustion when he returned with Ithariel’s rider. Crazed the man might become, but he would never abjure compassion. That one quality would bind him to life; and that one flaw would kill him.

Night deepened. The calls of a wakeful mockingbird rang over the waters of the lake. In the top chamber of the tower, Ithariel of the White Circle stilled her final note. She opened her eyes to starlight, and a crystal that now was a perfect jewel, round and shining with wardspells. The surface was faceted more precisely than any gem cutter’s art; and the magic it contained lay beyond any natural force in Aerith to rend asunder.

One moment the enchantress allowed herself to appreciate the results of her labors. The tallix Korendir had dreamed for at last stood complete in her hands. All that remained was to waken the man and plead for a place at his side.

Ithariel rose to her feet. She wrapped the crystal in the trailing folds of her sleeve. The tremble in her knees had little to do with weariness as she crossed the chamber and ignited the first of the braziers, the north one, since the pull of greatest earth force originated there. She stepped sunward around the circle, and sparks like lit pearls leaped from her fingertips into the bundles of tied leaves. The flames caught without mishap. Smoke drifted across her eyes, and the sweet scents of burning herbs mingled with the smells of forest night that wafted in through the casements. Ithariel lit the south fire, and the west, and then the lesser points between. With the circle closed about her, she knelt by the man at the center.