‘Khalad!’ Berit was actually shocked.
‘Have you ever seen him try to use tools? That was something our father used to tell us over and over: “Don’t ever let Sparhawk pick up a tool.” Kalten’s fairly good with his hands, but Sparhawk’s hopeless. If you hand him anything associated with honest work, he’ll hurt himself with it.’ Khalad’s head came up sharply, and he swore.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Didn’t you feel it? The port-side tow-ropes just went slack. Let’s go wake up those sailors. We don’t want this big cow turning broadside on us again.’ The two fur-clad young men started across the icy collection of lashed-together rafts, skirting the huge corral where the horses huddled together in the bitterly cold breeze coming from astern.
The idea of making a log-boom out of the rafts was very good in theory, but the problems of steering proved to be far more complex than either Sorgi or Khalad had anticipated. Khalad’s thickly woven fences of evergreen boughs acted well enough as sails, moving the sheer dead weight of the boom steadily southward ahead of Xanetia’s breeze. Sorgi’s ships were supposed to provide steerageway by towing the boom, and that was where the problems cropped up. No two ships ever move at exactly the same rate of speed, even when propelled by the same wind. Thus, the fifty ships ahead and the twenty-five strung out along each side of the boom had to be almost constantly fine-tuned to keep the huge raft moving in the right general direction. As long as everybody paid very close attention, all went well. Two days south of Bhelliom’s wall, however, a number of things had gone wrong all at once, and the log-boom had swung round sideways. No amount of effort had been able to straighten it out, and so they had been obliged to take it apart and reassemble it – back-breaking labor in the bitter cold. Nobody wanted to go through that again.
When they reached the port side of the boom, Berit took a dented brass horn out from under his fur cape and blew a flat, off-key blast at the port-side tow-boats while Khalad picked up a yellow flag and began to wave it vigorously. The pre-arranged signals were simple. The yellow flag told the ships to crowd on more sail to keep the towing hawsers taut; the blue flag told them to put out the sea-anchors to slack off on the ropes; and the red flag told them to cast off all lines and get out of the way.
The tow-ropes went tight again as Khalad’s crisp signal trickled down through the ranks to the sailors who actually did the work aboard the ships.
‘How do you keep track of everything?’ Berit asked his friend. ‘And how do you know so quickly that something’s wrong?’
‘Pain,’ Khalad replied wryly. ‘I don’t really want to spend several days taking this beast apart and putting it back together again with the spray freezing on me, so I’m paying very close attention to the things my body’s telling me. You can feel things change in your legs and the soles of your feet. When one of the hawsers goes slack, it changes the feel of how the boom moves.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know how to do?’
‘I don’t dance very well.’ Khalad squinted up into the first stinging pellets of another sleet-squall. ‘It’s time to feed and water the horses,’ he said. ‘Let’s go tell the novices to stop sitting around admiring their titles and get to work.’
‘You really dislike the aristocracy, don’t you?’ Berit asked as they started forward along the edge of the corral toward the wind-whipped tents of the apprentice knights.
‘No, I don’t dislike them. I just don’t have any patience with them, and I can’t understand how they can be so blind to what’s going on around them. A title must be a very heavy thing to carry if the weight makes you ignore everything else.’
‘You’re going to be a knight yourself, you know.’
‘It wasn’t my idea. Sparhawk gets silly sometimes. He thinks that making knights of my brothers and me is a way of honoring our father. I’m sure that Father’s laughing at him right now.’
They reached the tents, and Khalad raised his voice. ‘All right, gentlemen!’ he shouted. ‘It’s time to feed and water the animals! Let’s get at it!’ Then he critically surveyed the corral. Five thousand horses leave a great deal of evidence that they have been present. ‘I think it’s time for another lesson in the virtue of humility for our novices,’ he said quietly to Berit. Then he raised his voice again. ‘And after you’ve finished with that, you’d better break out the scoop-shovels and wheel-barrows again. We wouldn’t want to let the work pile up on us, would we, gentlemen?’
Berit was not yet fully adept at some of the subtler forms of magic. That part of the Pandion training was the study of a lifetime. He was far enough along, however, to recognize ‘tampering’ when he encountered it. The log-boom seemed to be lumbering southward at a crawl, but the turning of the seasons was giving some things away. It should have taken them much longer to escape the bitter cold of the far north, for one thing, and the days should not have become so much longer in such a short time, for another.
However it was managed, and whoever managed it, they arrived at a sandy beach a few miles north of Matherion late one golden autumn afternoon long before they should have and began wading the horses ashore from the wobbly collection of rafts.
‘Short trip,’ Khalad observed laconically as the two watched the novices unloading the horses.
‘You noticed,’ Berit laughed.
‘They weren’t particularly subtle about it. When the spray stopped freezing in my beard between one minute and the next, I started having suspicions.’ He paused. ‘Is magic very hard to learn?’ he asked.
‘The magic itself isn’t too hard. The hard part is learning the Styric language. Styric doesn’t have any regular verbs. They’re all irregular – and there are nine tenses.’
‘Berit, please speak plain Elenic’
‘You know what a verb is, don’t you?’
‘Sort of, but what’s a tense?’
Somehow that made Berit feel better. Khalad did not know everything. ‘We’ll work on it,’ he assured his friend. ‘Maybe Sephrenia can make some suggestions.’
The sun was going down in a blaze of color when they rode through the opalescent gates into fire-domed Matherion, and it was dusk when they reached the imperial compound.
‘What’s wrong with everybody?’ Khalad muttered as they rode through the gate.
‘I didn’t follow that,’ Berit confessed.
‘Use your eyes, man! Those gate-guards were looking at Sparhawk as if they expected him to explode – or maybe turn into a dragon. Something’s going on, Berit.’
The Church Knights rode off across the twilight-dim lawn to their barracks while the rest of them clattered across the drawbridge into Ehlana’s castle. They dismounted in the torch-lit courtyard and trooped inside.
‘It’s even worse here,’ Khalad murmured. ‘Let’s stay close to Sparhawk in case we have to restrain him. The knights at the drawbridge seemed to be actually afraid of him.’
They went up the stairs to the royal apartment. Mirtai was not in her customary place at the door, and that made Berit even more edgy. Khalad was right. Something here was definitely not the way it should be.
Emperor Sarabian, dressed in his favorite purple doublet and hose, was nervously pacing the blue-carpeted floor of the sitting-room as they entered, and he seemed to shrink back as Sparhawk and Vanion approached him.
‘Your Majesty,’ Sparhawk greeted him, inclining his head. ‘It’s good to see you again.’ He looked around. ‘Where’s Ehlana?’ he asked, laying his helmet on the table.
‘Uh – in a minute, Sparhawk. How did things go on the North Cape?’
‘More or less the way we’d planned. Cyrgon doesn’t command the Trolls any more, but we’ve got another problem that might be even worse.’
‘Oh?’
‘We’ll tell you about it when Ehlana joins us. It’s not such a pretty story that we’d want to go through it twice.’
The Emperor gave Foreign Minister Oscagne a helpless look.
‘Let’s go speak with Baroness Melidere, Prince sparhawk,’ Oscagne suggested. ‘Something’s happened here. She was present, so she’ll be able to answer your questions better than we would.’
‘All right.’ Sparhawk’s gaze was level, and his voice was steady, despite the fact that Sarabian’s nervousness and Oscagne’s evasive answer fairly screamed out the fact that something was terribly wrong.
Baroness Melidere sat propped up in her bed. She wore a fetching blue dressing-gown, but the sizeable bandage on her left shoulder was a clear indication that something serious had happened. Her face was pale, but her eyes were cool and rock-steady. Stragen sat at her bedside in his white satin doublet, his face filled with concern.
‘Well,’ Melidere said, ‘finally.’ Her voice was crisp and businesslike. She flicked a withering glance at the Emperor and his advisers. I see that these brave gentlemen have decided to let me tell you about what happened here, Prince Sparhawk. I’ll try to be brief. One night a couple of weeks ago, the Queen, Alean, and I were getting ready for bed. There was a knock on the door, and four men we thought were Peloi came in. Their heads were shaved and they wore Peloi clothing, but they weren’t Peloi. One of them was Krager. The other three were Elron, Baron Parok, and Scarpa.’
Sparhawk did not move, and his face did not change expression. ‘And?’ he asked, his voice still unemotional.
‘You’ve decided to be sensible, I see,’ Melidere said coolly. ‘Good. We exchanged a few insults, and then Scarpa told Elron to kill me – just to prove to the Queen that he was serious. Elron lunged at me, and I deflected his thrust with my wrist. I fell down and smeared the blood around to make it appear that I’d been killed. Ehlana threw herself over me, pretending to be hysterical, but she’d seen what I’d done.’ The Baroness took a ruby ring out from under her pillow. This is for you, Prince Sparhawk. Your wife hid it in my bodice. She also said, “Tell Sparhawk that I’m all right, and tell him that I forbid him to give up Bhelliom, no matter what they threaten to do to me.” Those were her exact words. Then she covered me with a blanket.’
Sparhawk took the ring and slipped it onto his finger. I see,’ he said in a calm voice. ‘What happened then, Baroness?’
‘Scarpa told your wife that he and his friends were taking her and Alean as hostages. He said that you were so foolishly attached to her that you’d give him anything for her safe return. He obviously intends to exchange her for the Bhelliom. Krager had a note already prepared. He cut off a lock of Ehlana’s hair to include in the note. I gather that there’ll be other notes, and each one will have some of her hair in it to prove that it’s authentic. Then they took Ehlana and Alean and left.’
‘Thank you, Baroness,’ Sparhawk said, his voice still steady. ‘You’ve shown amazing courage in this unfortunate business. May I have the note?’
Melidere reached under her pillow again, took out a folded and sealed piece of parchment, and handed it to him.
