2

If the cat who shares your house will not speak to you, remember first that cats, like the Goddess their Mother, never speak unless there is something worth saying, and someone who needs to hear it.

They were called the Middle Kingdoms because they were in the middle of the world as men then knew it. To the north was the great Sea, of which little was known. Ships had gone out into it many times, seeking for the Isles of the North mentioned in tale and rumor, but if those Isles existed, no ship had come back to tell about them. To the west, on the far western border of Arlen, was a great impassable range of mountains. Legend said that the demons’ country of Hreth lay beyond them, but no-one particularly cared to brave the terrible snow-choked passes and find out. Southward there were more mountains, the Highpeaks or Southpeaks, depending on whether you were speaking Arlene or Darthene; no-one had even ventured far enough into them to find out if they ever ended, though there were stories of the Five Meres hidden among them. Eastward, past the river Stel, the eastern border of Steldin and Darthen and civilized lands in general, the lands stretched into great empty desert wastes. Many had tried to cross them; most came back defeated, and the rest never came back at all. Those who did come back would occasionally speak of uncanny happenings, but most of the time they flatly refused to discuss the Waste. The Dragons might have known more about what went on there, or in the lands over the mountains; but Dragons only talk to the human Marchwarders who are sometimes their companions, and the Marchwarders, when asked, would smile and shake their heads.

The Kingdoms were four: Arlen, Darthen, Steldin, and North Arlen. Through them were scattered various small independent cities and principalities. The Brightwood was one of these, though like most of the smaller autonomies it had joined itself to a larger Kingdom, Darthen, for purposes of trade and protection. Arlen and Darthen were the two oldest Kingdoms, and the greatest; between them they stretched straight across all the known lands, from the mountains to the Waste Unclaimed, slightly more than three hundred leagues. The border between them was defined by the river Arlid, which flows from the Highpeaks to the Sea, south to north, a hundred leagues or so. It was not a guarded border, for the two lands had been bound by oaths of peace and friendship for hundreds of years. That, however, might change shortly . . . 

Herewiss rode along through the sparsely wooded, hilly country three days’ journey south of the Brightwood, and thought about politics. It seemed that there was nothing in the world that could be depended upon. The Oath of Lion and Eagle had been sworn for the first time nearly twelve hundred years ago, and sworn again every time a king or queen came to the throne in either country—until now. When Freelorn’s father King Ferrant had died on the throne six years past, Freelorn had been in Darthen; but it might not have been possible for Freelorn to claim the kingship even if he had been in Prydon city when it happened. Ferrant had not yet held the ceremony of affirmation in which the White Stave was passed on to his son, and Freelorn’s status was therefore in question. Power had been seized shortly thereafter by a group of the king’s former counsellors, backed by mercenary forces hired by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer; and this lord, a man named Cillmod, had declared Freelorn outlawed.

These occurrences, though personally outrageous to Herewiss, were not beyond belief. Such things had happened before. But six months ago, armed forces, both mercenaries and Arlene regulars, had moved into Darthen and taken land on the east side of the Arlid. Though the Oath had not been sworn again by the ruling junta, that did not make it any less binding on them. In all the years since its first swearing at the completion of the Great Road, neither country had ever attacked the other. Herewiss was nervous; he felt as if lightning were overdue to strike.

“Listen,” his father had said to him, leaning on the doorpost of Herewiss’s room three days before, “are you sure you don’t want some people to take with you?”

“I’m sure.” Herewiss had been packing; he was standing before his bookshelf, choosing the grimoires he would take with him. “Notice would be taken—there would be reprisals later. The situation would only get worse. And even with the biggest force we could muster, we wouldn’t have a third enough people to crack a siege that size. Besides, our people need to be here, putting in crops.” Herewiss took down a thick leatherbound book, filled with notes and spells of illusion.

“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 trailfood 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 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 the second-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 is 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? And I’m taking that damn turtleshell 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 deserves to kill me, I think: 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 sword tail 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 have 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 enough of the Fire to use—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 goodbye 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 a little 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’-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, hetscold, 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 whenever 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 beginning to appear. They became more frequent as Herewiss and Dapple descended into the lowlands, and one very large farm with stone markers 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.

It was the steak pie that 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, grayhaired 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 best and most charming smile at her.

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

“Two.”

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

“He is, madam.”

“Dinner?”

“Oh, yes,” 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 Délann 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.

He 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 ending 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 in playing 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 is sometimes fatally jealous of Her modesty.

Someone blocked the light, and he looked up—a girl, maybe eighteen years old or so, 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 notice of the view down her blouse, but he was more interested in the steak pie.

“Nice,” he said. “A fork, please?”

“Hmm?” She in her turn was being very interested in Herewiss.

“A fork?”

“Oh. Yes, certainly—” She reached into her pocket and brought one out for him. Herewiss took it, wiped it off, and dove almost desperately into the pie.

“Ahh, listen,” she said, bending down again, and Herewiss began an intensive study of a piece of potato, “are you busy this evening?”

Herewiss did his best to look at her with profound sorrow. She really wasn’t his type, and there was a mercenary look in her eye that sent him hurriedly to the excuse box in the back of his head. “If you’re thinking what I think you are,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I’m under vows of chastity.”

“You don’t look like you’re in an Order,” she said.

“Perpetual chastity,” Herewiss said. “Or until the Eagle comes back. Sorry.”

The girl stood up. “Well,” she said, “if you change your mind, ask the lady in the kitchen where I am. I’m her daughter.”

Herewiss nodded, and she went away into the kitchen. He sagged a little as the door closed behind her, and settled back against the wall.

That was a bit panicky of me, Herewiss thought as he began to eat. I wonder what it is about her that bothers me so—

He put the thought aside and concentrated on the hot-spiced food and the heavy ale. The common room began slowly to fill up as he ate; the local clientele was coming in from the fields and houses to enjoy each other’s company. The big table nearest him was occupied by a noisy, cheerful group of farmers from the Arian landholdings, nine or ten brawny men and lithe ladies, all deeply tanned and smelling strongly of honest work. They called loudly for food and drink, and hailed Herewiss like a brother when they spotted him in his corner. He smiled back at them, and before long they were exchanging crude jokes and bad puns, and laughing like a lot of fools.

When the inn’s cat strolled by, it was greeted politely by the farmers, and offered little pieces of meat or game. It declined all these graciously and in silence, and went on by, making its rounds. As it passed it looked hard at Herewiss, as if it recognized him. He nodded at it; the cat looked away as if unconcerned, and moved on.

As the ale flowed and the evening flowered, the storytelling and singing began in earnest. Most of the stories were ones already known to everyone there, but no-one seemed to care much about that—Kingdoms people have a love of stories, as long as the story wears a different face each time. Someone began with the old one about what Éalor the Prince of Darthen had done with the fireplace poker, which was later named Sársweng and had its haft encrusted with diamonds. Then someone else got up and told about something more recent, news only a hundred and five years old, how the lady Fáran Fersca’s daughter had gone out with her twelve ships to look for the Isles of the North, and how only one ship had come back after a year, and what had happened to it. This was told in an unusual fashion, sung to an antique rhyme-form by a little old lady with a surprisingly strong soprano. There was a great deal of stamping and cheering and applause when she finished; and several people, judging correctly that the lady was quite young inside, whatever her apparent age, propositioned her immediately. She said yes to one of the propositions, and she and the gentleman went upstairs immediately to more applause.

In the commotion, the lute was passed around to the farmers’ table and one of them started to sing the song about the Brindle Cat of Aes Arädh, how it carried away the chief bard of a Steldene king on its back because of an insulting song he had sung before the Four Hundred of Arlen, and what the bard saw in the Otherworld to which the cat took him. Herewiss joined in on the choruses, and one of the ladies at the farmers’ table noticed the quality of his voice and called to him, “You’re next!” He shook his head, but when the man with the lute was finished, it was passed back to him. He looked at it with resignation, and then smiled a little at a sudden memory.

“All right,” he said, pushed his chair back, and perched himself on the edge of the farmers’ table, pausing a moment to tune one of the strings that had gone a quarter-tone flat. The room quieted down; he strummed a chord and began to sing.

Of the many stories concerning the usage of the blue Fire, probably the most tragic is that of Queen Béaneth of Darthen and her lover Astrin. Astrin was taken by the Shadow’s Hunting one Opening Night, and Béaneth went to her rescue. That rescue seemed a certain thing, for Béaneth was a Rodmistress, one of the great powers of her time. But the price demanded of her for Astrin’s release was that Béaneth must mate with the Shadow, and take into herself whatever evil He would choose for her to bear. Béaneth, knowing that the evil to grow within her would warp her Power to its own use, lay down with the Shadow indeed, but killed herself at the climax of the act, thereby keeping her bargain and obtaining her loved’s release.

Her little daughter Béorgan was five years old when all this happened. Béorgan made the decision early to avenge her mother, and determined that she would meet the Shadow on His own ground and destroy Him. She trained, and grew great in Power—and also in obsession—waiting and preparing for Nineteen-Years’ Night, that night when it is both Opening Night and Full Moon. All the Kingdoms know how the story ends—how Béorgan went down to the Morrowfane on that night, being then twenty-four years of age, and opened the Morrowfane Gate beneath the waters of Lake Rilthor, and passed through into the Otherworlds. There she met the Shadow, and there she slew Him, on one of the only nights this may be done, when the Goddess’s power conjoins with the returning Sun past midnight. Béorgan’s triumph was shortlived, though, and so was she. She had never planned her life past that night, and in a short time wasted away and died. Even her victory was hollow, for however bright the Lover may be, still he casts the Shadow: seven years after He died, He was back again, leading the Hunting as always.

Freelorn had always loved the story, and some years back had composed a verse form of it, and a musical setting that Herewiss had liked. At the time, though, Freelorn’s voice had been changing, and Herewiss had had to restrain himself from laughing as his loved sang that greatest of tragedies in a voice that cracked crazily every verse or so. He had even refrained from singing it himself for the longest while, for the sound of his pure, deep, already-changed tenor had made Freelorn twice as self-conscious as he usually was.

He sang the setting now, letting his voice go as he would have liked to all those years ago, pausing between verses to insert the last dialogue between Béaneth and Astrin, and later the farewell of Béorgan to her husband Ánmod, who later became King of both Arlen and Darthen because of her death. He forgot about the hot, smoky room, forgot about time and pain and the systematic destruction of swords, and just sang, feeling very young again for the first time in ever so long.

At the end of it he received tremendous applause, and he bowed shyly and handed the lute to someone else, going back to his table and his ale. There he sat for a few minutes, recovering. Someone began singing almost immediately, but the farmers started talking quietly among themselves. The contrast between the sung verses of terrible tragedy beyond the boundaries of the world and the homely talk of the farmers was abrupt, but pleasant; they had slow, musical voices, and Herewiss dawdled over his ale, listening alternately to the words and the sound of them. One of the farmers started telling a long, drawn-out story of a loved of his who had gone traveling. “All the way to Dra’Mincarrath she went,” he said in a drawl. “aye, all that way south, and then east again into the Waste she went, not knowing where she was going, on account of being lost. Right into the Waste Unclaimed, and north she turned after a little, on account of being lost again. And came in sight of that hold in the Waste, indeed, and—”

“Ssh!” said several of the other farmers, looking upset, and “She came out again,” said one of them, seemingly the eldest. “Count her lucky; that place is bad to talk of, even here. Then where did she go? . . . ”

Herewiss sat nursing his ale, a little curious at the sudden and vehement response. Hold in the Waste—? What could that be? No-one lived out there—

His thought was broken by the underheard feeling that someone was looking at him with unkindly intent. He glanced up and saw the innkeeper’s daughter. She was across the room, serving someone else, but he could feel her eyes on him. He looked down at his ale again quickly, not particularly wanting to see her bend over again.

There was a sudden motion to his right. He looked, and saw the cat, a big gray tabby with blue eyes, balancing itself on the table edge after its leap. It lay down, tucking its forepaws beneath its chest so that it looked like a broody hen, and half-closed its eyes.

“Well, hello,” Herewiss said, putting down his mug to scratch under the cat’s chin. It squeezed its eyes shut altogether and stretched its neck out all the way, purring like a gray-furred thunderstorm.

Herewiss went back to the contemplation of his ale, rubbing under the cat’s chin automatically for a few minutes. Then suddenly the cat opened up its round blue eyes. “Prince,” it said in its soft raspy voice, “mind the innkeeper’s daughter.”

He laughed a little under his breath. “No-one keeps a secret from a cat,” he quoted. “May I ask what you’re called?”

“M’ssssai,” it said. “That is my inner Name, prince: the outer doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll keep your secret,” Herewiss said in ritual response, and then added, “but I have none to give you in return. I don’t know it yet.”

“Well enough. Time will come, and then you can come back and tell me.”

“Forgive me,” Herewiss said, “but how did you know who I am?”

“I’ve been in your saddlebag.”

“It had a binding on it.”

The cat smiled, and after a moment Herewiss smiled back at it. Cats, the legend said, had been created second after men, and had a Flame of their own, one which they had never lost.

“The very fact of a binding,” M’ssssai said. “made me slightly suspicious. I could smell it from down here, and know you for its author. And the contents of the bags settled the matter. Only two men alive wear that surcoat, and you’re too young to be one of them, so you must be the other.”

“Granted.”

“What are you doing with those grimoires in your bags?”

Herewiss made a face. “Isn’t it said of my Line that there’s no accounting for us? I’m a sorcerer. A part-time sorcerer, out seeing the world.”

M’ssssai half-closed his eyes again. “Sorcerers usually stay at home unless they have something in hand. And you’re more than just a sorcerer, prince. I know the smell of Flame.”

“I have no Focus,” Herewiss said, very softly, “and no control. I can’t use a Rod.”

“The innkeeper’s daughter,” said the cat. “is a dabbler; she has just enough Flame to be able to smell it herself, though she has no focus either, and no control. But she’s looking for a way to free her Power, and I dare say she’s noticed at least part of what you are. If I were you, I’d keep the shields up around your bags tonight, or else sleep lightly. She’s a brewer of semi-effective love potions, and she throws her curses crooked—she has a most undisciplined mind. Not to mention that she’d probably try to drain you—”

“A vampire?”

“In the bedsheets; she’s acquired a taste for it. I see too many people going out of here looking lost and drained in the morning.”

“M’ssssai, I thank you.” Herewiss scratched behind the cat’s ears. “But why are you telling me all this?”

The cat smiled. “You have good hands.”

M’ssssai stood up, stretched, arching his back, his tail straight up in the air. “Mind her, now,” he said, and jumped down from the table, vanishing into the forest of trestles and benches.

Herewiss looked up cautiously. The innkeeper’s daughter had just come down from upstairs, and was going through the kitchen door. He took his opportunity and eased out from behind the table, heading hurriedly for the protection of the shadows of the stairway. He took the stairs two at a time, sloshing ale in all directions, pausing at the top of the stairs to get his bearings; it was quite dark up there. Then he headed softly down the hail, trying to keep the floor from creaking under him, his breath going up before him like pale smoke in the chill air.

His room door was ajar. He listened at it, but heard nothing. A swift cold draft was whispering through the crack. Gently he put his weight against the door; it opened with a low tired groan. There was no-one inside.

He went in, still moving carefully, and bent down by the window to check his bags. The surcoat was ever so slightly mussed, unfolded just enough to clearly show the Phoenix charged on it; and the lockshield around the bags was parted cleanly in one place, an invisible incision right through the spell, big enough for a cat to put a paw through.

Herewiss laughed and got up. With flint and steel he lit the room’s one candle, a stub of tallow in a smoky, cracked glass by the big four-poster bed. Even in the glass, the flame bent and bobbled wildly until Herewiss closed the shutters at the window. For a few seconds he regarded the worm-holed old door.

“All right,” he said softly. “Let her think I had a bit too much to drink.” He crossed to the door and closed it without shooting the bolt, then flicked a word and a gesture back at the bags and dissolved the lockshield.

Herewiss pulled back the faded, patched coverlet and sat down on the bed. Immediately there was a sudden sharp feeling in the back of his head, a nagging feeling like a splinter, or the dull hurt of a burn. He got up again hurriedly, stripping the covers all the way back and feeling about the sheets. When he lifted up the pillow, there it was—a little muslin bag, with runes of the Nhàirëdi sorcerer’s speech crudely stitched on it, and a brown stain that was probably blood.

Herewiss took his knife from the sheath at his belt and lifted the little bag on its blade, carrying it over to the table where the candle sat. It took him a little while to poke a large enough hole in it without touching it directly, but when he did, and shook out the contents, he nodded. Asafetida; crumbs of choke-pard and wyverns-tooth; a leaf of moonwort, the black-veined kind picked in Moon’s decline; and also a little lump of something soft—a bit of potato from his plate at dinner. He scowled. Elements of sleep-charm and love-charm, mixed together—with the moonwort to befuddle the mind and bind the sleeper to someone else’s wishes.

What does she think I am? She must not know I’m a sorcerer or she wouldn’t try something so ridiculously simple—

Shaking his head, Herewiss laid the steel knife down on the little pile of herbs. “Ehrénië haladh séresh,” he said, and spat on the blade. When he picked it up again, the moonwort had shriveled into a tight black ball, and the warning pain in the back of his head was gone.

He set the cloth bag afire with the candle flame, and carried it still burning to the window, opening the shutter and throwing the bag out along with the bits of herbs. Then he went back and stretched out on the bed, reaching for the mug. The ale was getting warm. He made a face, put the mug aside, and lay back against the headboard, crossing his arms and sighing. It was going to be a long wait.

At some time past one in the morning Herewiss was listening wearily to the sound of some patron of the inn wobbling about in the courtyard, singing (if that was the word) the old song about the King of Darthen’s lover. The inn’s good ale seemed to have completely removed any fears the drunk had ever had of high notes, and he was squeaking and warbling through the choruses in a falsetto fit to give any listener a headache. Herewiss had one.

The man had just gotten to the verse about the goats when Herewiss heard the door grunt a little, and saw it scrape inward a bit. He lay back quickly, peeking out from beneath lowered lids. There was another soft scraping sound, and in stepped the innkeeper’s daughter, wrapped in a blanket against the cold. She looked long and hard at him, and it was all Herewiss could do to keep from grinning. After a few moments, satisfied that he was asleep, she smiled and crossed the room quietly to where his bags lay.

The one she peered into first was the one with the surcoat. Slowly and carefully she pulled it out and spread it wide to look at the device. There was no light in the room but the pale moonlight seeping in through one half-open shutter, and the dim glow of the torches down in the courtyard. It took her a while to make out the Phoenix in Flames, but when she did she bit her lip, then smiled again, and folded up the surcoat.

Deeper down in the bag she found the book bound in red leather, the unsealed one, and drew it out carefully. The innkeeper’s daughter sat down on her heels and muttered something under her breath. A weak reddish light grew and glowed about her hands, clinging to the book’s pages as she turned them. For a few minutes she went through the book, turning the leaves over in cautious silence. Then suddenly she stopped, and across the room Herewiss could hear her take in breath sharply. He watched her as she traced down one page with a finger, moving her lips slowly as she read.

That’s a bad habit, Herewiss thought. Let’s see if I can’t break you of it.

The girl was holding the book closer to her eyes, and speaking softly. “Neskháired ól jomëire kal stói, arvéya khad—”

Herewiss breathed out in irritation. I might have known. Doesn’t she know it’s all illusion-spells? She can’t know much about what real sorcery is, or what it does. And Goddess knows she would pick that one. She needs a lot more to be beautiful on the inside than she does on the outside. It’s not going to work, of course. She’s not making any passes, and she’s set up no framework inside her head. Dark! I’ll teach her to mess with things she doesn’t understand—

Herewiss cleared his mind and began to think of another incantation, on another page. He had long since ceased to need to draw diagrams or make passes while conjuring. Constant practice had taught him to build viable spell-structures in his head, without external aids. He built one now, a fairly simple one that he had used many times to entertain Halwerd, an illusion-spell that required minimal energy and provided surprisingly sophisticated results. It went up quickly, in large chunks, taking form and bulking huge and restless—it was one of those sorceries that has to be used quickly before it goes stale. He completed the structure, checking once to make sure that it was complete, and thought the word that set it free to work.

The girl, intent on her reading, did not notice the air behind her thickening and growing dark. Something darker and more tenacious than smoke curled and roiled within a huge man-shaped space in the air, until at last it stood complete behind her—a little tenuous at the edges, where its stuff wisped and drifted into the still air, but dark as starless midnight at its heart. The innkeeper’s daughter finished reading the spell and raised one hand to feel at her face. In that moment the great dark shape put out a hand and brushed the back of her neck lightly.

She slapped absently at what she thought was an insect, and felt her hand go through something cold and damp. Her eyes went wide with startlement; she turned. She saw, and opened her mouth to scream. But Herewiss was ready. Since freeing the illusion, he had been readying another spell, and as she drew breath he said the word of control and struck her dumb and stiff. There she knelt, her mouth ridiculously open, head turned to look over her shoulder—probably a most uncomfortable position. Herewiss smiled, and got up out of the bed, praying that the backlash would hold off for a few minutes.

“Do you always go through your guests’ bags at one in the morning?” he said, bending down to take the book away from her and toss it on to the bed. “And do all the rooms come equipped with that charming little addition under the pillow?”

She could not even move her eyes to follow him as he went to open the window wide. “Would you excuse us?” he said to the smoke-creature. There had always been controversy over whether illusion-creatures were alive and thinking in any sense of the words, but Herewiss, being both cautious and courteous by nature, treated his illusions as if they were both. “And while you’re out there, please take that man down there and bed him down in the stable or something. If I hear that part about the goats again, I may turn him into one.”

The dark shape waded slowly through the air, trailing streams of black smoke behind it, and climbed over the windowsill into the night. It drifted down silently into the courtyard.

“Would you like to be a goat?” Herewiss said, going back to look at the girl from behind, so that she could see him. “Or an owl might be better—you seem to like being up in the middle of the night.”

He was bluffing outrageously, for no mere sorcery could do such things. She seemed not to know this, though. She stared at Herewiss wide-eyed, the terror frozen in her face. Outside, a voice broke off its singing. “Boy, izh really dark out here,” it said, woozily surprised.

“Or maybe you’d like to bed down with my friend out there,” Herewiss said, “since you do seem to be so eager, with that love-charm and all. I should tell you, though, he is a little cold—and you might have a baby afterwards, and I couldn’t guarantee what it would look like.”

He made a small adjustment in his mind and snapped his fingers, freeing her upper half but keeping her legs bound tight. She sagged and turned her face away from him quickly. “Tell me what you were after,” Herewiss said.

“I—” She shuddered. “I don’t want to share with that—”

“Then start talking.”

She stared sullenly at the floor. “I smelled the Power,” she said. “You have it. I want to know how. If a man can have it, then there has to be a way for me to bring mine out.” She looked up, glared at him. “How did you do it?” she demanded bitterly. “Who did you pact with?”

“My my,” Herewiss said. “You are a dabbler. Everyone has the Power, dear, didn’t you know that? Men and women both, everyone born has the spark. But few have enough to do anything with. And Goddess knows there’s more to it than just having enough Flame. What was the bag for, by the way?”

She scowled at the floor again, and would not answer him.

“A little draining to amuse yourself? I should tell you, the Bride doesn’t look kindly on such things. Draining away your lovers’ potency is likely to make you less of a woman, not more. And anyway, who taught you your Nhàired? Two of the words on the bag were misspelled, and there was too much asafetida. If you had left that there much longer, it would have started to recoil, and half the place would probably have tried to rape you. Try draining that.”

Herewiss sighed. “You’re not being very open with me,” he said. “I’m in a quandary as to what to do with you. Maybe you really do want to be a goat.” He went over to the bag on the floor and took out the other book, the one with the seals on it. Softly he said the word to undo the seals, and the second word that spoke the pages apart, and then went through the book slowly, looking for the right page.

The innkeeper’s daughter was beginning to worry now. “Please!” she said, “please, no—I’ll do anything—”

She squirmed her torso at him, and Herewiss looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head in mild amazement. “I’m not interested in that kind of anything,” he said. “I might consider information, though,” he said. “Tonight at dinner some people were talking and someone mentioned a place called the ‘hold in the Waste’, and everyone else hushed them up. What is that? Why won’t they talk about it?”

Fresh fear went across the girl’s face like a shadow. “I don’t know—”

His underhearing jabbed him hard under one rib, like the pain one gets from running too hard, and he knew she was lying. “Then I guess I’ll have to turn you into a goat,” he said, wondering how he was going to make the bluff good, and turned his attention to the page before him. “Fáslie anrástüw oi vëlien—”

“No, no, wait—” She looked around fearfully. “It’s unlucky even to talk about it—”

“Being a goat isn’t unlucky?”

“Uh—well. Out in the Waste Unclaimed, about forty miles or so into the desert, there’s an Old Place—the oldest of the Old Places in all the world.” She gulped. “It’s full of the Old wreaking, and ghosts and monsters walk around there. Sometimes the desert around it—changes somehow, and becomes other places. I don’t know how—”

“I know what you mean. Go on.”

“They say that the rocks roll uphill, and water flows sideways along the hills there, or up the sides of valleys—and it rains scorpions and stones instead of water. Even the Dragons won’t go near it; they say it’s too dangerous. There are doors into Otherwheres—”

“Doors?” Herewiss echoed.

“That’s all there is,” the girl said. “It’s not lucky to talk about it. It’s a cursed place.”

“No,” Herewiss said, “just Old, I would imagine. We don’t know enough about the Old people’s wreaking to know their curses from their blessings. Forty miles into the desert. Near where?”

“North of the pass above Dra’Mincarrath,” she said, “about sixty miles or so. But it’s cursed—”

Herewiss stood there silently for a long few moments, holding the backlash away while reading the spell in the book, readying it. “That’ll do, I think,” he said. “But one thing only.”

She looked at him in fear. “I don’t trust any promises you might make about your future behaviour,” he said. “So I am going to give you a conscience of sorts.”

He spoke the last word of the spell under his breath, and immediately the girl groaned and doubled over, clutching at her stomach. “The next time you sleep with a man or woman for whom you don’t care, that will take you,” he said. “Don’t bother trying to rid yourself of it; if you meddle, you may find that particular avenue of pleasure permanently closed. And let me give you advice—don’t play around with sorcery. It shortens the life.”

He cut the air with one hand in a short quick motion, and the girl staggered to her feet and lurched without another word out the door.

Herewiss closed and sealed his book, fetched the other one from the bed, and put them back in his bag again. His head was aching violently, and his stomach churned, threatening to reject the steak pie.

Suddenly a dark shape loomed at the window. It was the smoke-creature, peering in curiously.

“Oh Dark, I forgot,” Herewiss said. He gestured at the window, the same quick cutting motion. “Go free. Rr’hai! And thank you.”

The creature bent a little with a passing night breeze, and dissipated silently.

“Ah, my head,” Herewiss groaned as he headed back to bed. “Shortens the life indeed. I wish I were dead.”

He pulled the covers up around him again, and laid his throbbing head down on the lumpy pillow as tenderly as he could. The darkness was almost peaceful for a few moments—until the sound of a drunken countertenor began to float up from the stable, half a tone flat, singing of what the King of Darthen did with the shepherdess and her brother.

“Oh Goddess,” Herewiss moaned, and buried his face in the pillow.