The Dragon Revenant (28 page)

“You can go and try to sleep if you want,” Rhodry said. “I’m wide awake.”

“So am I. Awake—and miserable. And forlorn, dejected, pathetic, dismal, bleak of heart. Ah, how I long for our father’s tent, its warm fire, its soft cushions, and above all, its waterproof roof and sides! I wouldn’t mind being surrounded by several hundred elven archers, either, come to think of it.”

“Nor more would I. Do you think we should turn back to Albara on the morrow?”

“I’m tempted, truly. I wonder if I—here, what’s that?”

They went silent, sitting as stone-still as only elves can. Very faintly, some distance away, Rhodry heard a noise, too muddled with the wind and drizzle for him to identify it. All at once the horses tossed up their heads and whickered. Rhodry and Salamander were on their feet, and Rhodry had his new sword drawn before he even realized he’d reached for it.

“Rhodry! Ware!”

It was Jill’s voice, coming from among the rocks. Cursing under his breath Rhodry started toward her, just as the horses and the mule went mad. All at once they were bucking, yanking at their tethers and pawing at the air with their fore hooves. As dim shadows Rhodry could see what the animals saw: horrible, deformed Wildfolk, with huge fangs and red, gleaming eyes, leaping and dashing straight for the stock.

“Ware!” Salamander screamed.

The tethers snapped, and the horses came plunging straight for them. With a yell Rhodry knocked Salamander to the ground and rolled with him downhill and to the side just barely in time. He saw hooves flash by and felt mud spatter his face as the galloping horses parted around them and plunged off into the darkness, heading back toward the road.

“May the Lord of Hell eat their intestines and their balls both,” Salamander gasped with the breath half knocked out of him. “Not the horses, I mean. Whoever did this.”

Rhodry could guess who that someone had to be and the kind of danger they represented.

“Jill!”

He scrambled to his feet and ran for the boulders with a swearing Salamander following. Something grabbed at his ankle—one of the evil Wildfolk, he assumed—and he went down, rolling smoothly and bounding up in the same motion.

“Jill!”

There was no answer, no sound at all, truly, except the far distant hiss and chuckle of the floodtide river. Even the horses, apparently, were far out of earshot. Panting a little, Salamander joined him at the edge of the rock-strewn terrace, where nothing moved.

“Do you think they’ve got an archer or suchlike with them?” Salamander whispered. “I can make a light if it won’t make us a target.”

“A light in this damp? Are you daft? No one could—oh, of course, my apologies. Well, if they were going to stick us like pigs, they would have done it by now.” Rhodry tipped his head back and called as loudly as he could. “Jill!”

A pale yellow light blossomed in the air above them to reveal a gleam of metal beside a heap of crumpled blankets. Rhodry raced over, stumbling a little, and picked up her sword, graved with the device of a striking falcon and running only with water now, not blood. His eyes burned tears.

“They’ve taken her.” He could barely speak. “I don’t know why, but the bastards have taken her.”

“I wonder, too, younger brother, but let us not despair. You forget that we have a vast if not truly mighty army at our command.”

“What? You’ve gone daft!”

Salamander whistled once under his breath and snapped his fingers. All around them in the golden light Wildfolk appeared, gnome and sprite and sylph, each one tiny, true enough, but there were hundreds of them crowding round, gray and brown, mottled and purplish-black, with their thin lips bared to reveal needle-sharp teeth, their eyes, yellow and red and green, gleaming with rage and indignation as they shook tiny clawed fists in the air. Although they were eerily silent, from the distant river Rhodry heard voices calling out to urge them on.

Jill woke suddenly to dim daylight and a hard floor. The side of her face stung like fire, every muscle in her body ached, and she was so cold that she was shaking, lying huddled in a corner on some kind of packed earth tiles. When she tried to stretch out, she realized that her hands were tied behind her back and her ankles lashed together. By moving very carefully and very slowly she managed to haul herself up to a sitting position and prop herself against the corner of the tiny bare room. The walls were whitewashed, and where one of them joined the ceiling was a small slit of a window. Since she could see earth through it as well as sky, she decided that she had to be in some sort of cellar, and from the smell as well as the burlap sacks lying around, she could guess it was a root cellar. Whispering so quietly that she was thinking more than speaking, Jill called her gnome. He appeared straightaway, bringing with him two large black-and-purple warty fellows with sharp teeth and big ears.

“Can you untie my hands?”

The bigger gnomes shook their heads in a mournful no, then proceeded to chew through the rope. Once she was free, rubbing her painful wrists with numb hands, her gnome and his friends disappeared again, leaving her to untie her ankles herself. For a long while she worked on her aching and complaining hands and legs, rubbing, stretching, shaking until at last she could stand up, cursing and stamping as the blood flowed back with fiery prickles. Outside the window something scuffled and scraped. She looked up to see a pack of purplish-black gnomes pushing a small bundle through the opening, something that dropped to the floor with a clatter. She pounced on it: her silver dagger in its leather sheath.

“My thanks, my friends. May your gods or whomever you serve bless you for this!”

When outside the door she heard sudden voices, she slipped the dagger out of sight into her shirt. There was a clang, and a curse or two as someone struggled with a lock; then the door opened and two men stepped in, one of them carrying a saddlebag; the other, a drawn sword. Since the fellow with his sword at the ready was a typical Bardekian, well over six feet tall with huge hands, and since the other man had a sword at his side too, she merely retreated to the far wall. The one who looked much like a Deverry man with his pale skin and straight black hair stared at her openmouthed. When he finally spoke, it was in Bardekian.

“You’re untied!”

“Of course I am. Haven’t you ever seen those tricks where the show master ties someone up and shoves them into a bag or chest, only to have them pop out again a few minutes later and wave to the crowd?”

Both her captors laughed, but it was a grim enough kind of chuckle.

“That’s one on us, Gwin,” said the Bardekian.

“I’ll admit it. We’ll have to keep a good watch on our clever little traveling player from now on.” He hefted the saddlebag. “Now, I’ve got paper and ink in here. You’re going to write a note, exactly as I tell you, and then we’ll give you some food and water. If you don’t write, you get nothing.”

“Then I’ll be dying of thirst, soon enough. I don’t know how to read and write. I’m from Deverry, remember.”

Gwin swore in some language that she couldn’t understand.

“She’s telling the truth, most likely. I should have thought of that.” He turned back to Jill. “Can Rhodry read?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play stupid with me.” His voice was very quiet and soft, and it sent a ripple of fear down her back. “It isn’t wise, little girl. Do you know who I am?”

“A Hawk of the Brotherhood, obviously.” It took all her will to keep her voice steady. “And yes, I know what you do to your prisoners.”

He smiled, just briefly, a gesture designed to frighten her, no doubt, but she made herself look him full in the face and smile in return, caught his gaze and held it, determined to stare him down and gain a small victory—the only kind, no doubt, that she’d have. For a moment he stared back, his mouth twisting in mockery. All at once, his face seemed to soften, to blur, and his eyes to change color, the black shimmering, then turning a cold hard blue like a winter sea. It seemed to her that she stood in some other room—she could almost see firelight behind him, could almost remember his real name, could almost remember why she envied him over something more important than her life itself.

“Bards aren’t allowed to read and write,” she said. “You know that.”

With a wrench and a toss of his head he looked away, and he was the one shaking now, not her, his face an ashy sort of gray, his eyes—black again—darting this way and that as the Bardekian with the sword stepped forward.

“Gwin, what’s wrong?”

“Naught.” Gwin tossed his head again, swallowed heavily, and made his voice perfectly steady—but he was still a little pale. “Our hostage is a lot more valuable than we thought, that’s all.” So smoothly she suspected nothing, he turned, then slapped her across the face, so hard that she fell back across the wall. “What do you mean, Rhodry’s a bard?”

“That’s not what I said at all.” She found herself thinking of her father’s slaps, when he was in one of his tempers, and forced herself to stay as unmoving now as she had then. Only one eye betrayed her by starting to swell and tear. “As for the meaning of what I did say, you’re as capable of puzzling it out as I am—neither more nor less.”

Gwin raised his hand, then hesitated. She could see that he was frightened, and she knew in some obscure way, deep in her soul, that she had him on the run and could keep him that way if only she chose the right words. She found herself thinking of him as a man near to breaking. Around her materialized Wildfolk in a restless, hostile swarm, glaring at her captors, shaking tiny fists, opening their mouths in soundless snarls to reveal long pointed teeth. When Gwin barked out a string of words in some language that she didn’t understand, some of the Wildfolk disappeared, more cowered against her in fear, but some growled boldly back at him.

“They won’t obey you,” Jill said. “But I’ll send them away rather than let you hurt them.” She raised her hand and did just that, scattering them more with her thought than with her gesture. Her gray gnome stayed to the last, snarling like a dog, until she chased him away with the stamp of a foot.

“Who are you?” It was the Bardekian, whispering under his breath, his dark face gray.

“You know.”

She said it as a portentous bluff and nothing more, but Gwin stepped back sharply. Not in fear—she realized suddenly that his mouth was working in honest effort, as if he were desperately trying to remember, that he seemed, in fact, close to tears, as if she had piled shock onto some private grief until he could stand the weight no more. The Bardekian kept looking back and forth between them, his eyes narrow with confusion.

“Gwin, what is all this?” he snarled, and ever so slightly he raised his sword, ever so slightly his shoulders tensed. “I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve told us the truth, or …”

The Bardekian had his sword in hand, and Gwin’s was in his scabbard, but all at once Gwin moved, steel flashed, there was a grunt and a spurt of blood. The Bardekian swayed, took one step, dropped his sword, and fell face-forward onto the floor. A long dagger smeared with blood in his hand, Gwin spun on his heel and caught Jill’s glance, swung up the dagger, and glared at her over the tip. She went stone-still and stared back into madness.

“I could kill you without half-trying,” he whispered.

“You could—easier than that.”

He smiled and lowered the dagger, but only by a few inches. She felt a trickle of cold sweat run between her breasts and another down her back. Behind him materialized her gray gnome and two purple-and-green fellows, all three of them grinning and dancing as they pointed at the world outside the window. With a wrench of will she looked only at Gwin’s face, but this time he refused to let her look into his eyes.

“You’re beautiful, for a witch,” he remarked, and his voice was so casual it was frightening. “But I know a trick or two against female magicks. You won’t ensorcel me again.”

She heard a sound, a scuff of a boot, maybe, that came from beyond the window, and spoke hurriedly to cover it.

“I never ensorceled you at all. I don’t even know what happened when I looked into your eyes, truly I don’t.”

“Oh, now you’re going to whine and weasel, are you, when I’ve got the better of you?” His grin was terrifying, as cold and rigid as the smirk on a corpse, but he did lower the dagger, holding it about waist-high in a relaxed hand.

“I’m telling you the simple truth. All I know is that I recognized you somehow, from somewhere.”

He threw up his head like a startled horse, the mad grin gone.

“I felt that way about Rhodry, when first I saw him. Do you know where that was? In a stinking tavern in the Bilge in Cerrmor, where Merryc and Baruma had him trapped, like a stag at bay with half a dozen rowdies round him, and he was laughing. One swordsman against six, and he laughed like it was the best jest in the world.” His voice had turned very soft. “It wrung my heart, somehow. Just like you said—somehow, and from somewhere.” Then he shook himself, the dagger flashing up, and grinned again as he took two steps toward her. “Don’t you think I hear them coming, too, girl? Do you think I’m stupid? You’re going to be my shield.”

With his free hand he made a grab toward her shoulder, intending, no doubt, to clutch her in front of him with the knife at her throat. Jill ducked, dropped, twisted as she came up and kicked him full in the stomach. As she came down, she grabbed his free wrist, dropped again, and flung him backwards over her shoulder to slam hard against the wall. His dagger went spinning out of reach. She pulled her own from her shirt, stripped it of the sheath, and dropped her weight to a fighting crouch as he scrambled up, out of breath but not in the least dazed from blows that would have left an ordinary man numb and gasping on the floor. To cover her sudden fear Jill laughed at him.

“I’m not a witch, Gwin, but I could have been an assassin like you.”

He laughed in return, a berserker’s chuckle under his breath that reminded her hideously of Rhodry.

“So you could have, and maybe I deserve to die for underestimating you like that. Let’s see what happens between you and me, shall we, girl?”