Son of the Hero (24 page)

I didn’t know what the connection was between the whistling and the elf sword, but I
had
figured out that they were linked.

The elflord made the first attack, bringing his sword overhead as he stepped forward—stomp the lead foot ahead, then drag up the other foot. I met his blade and pressed to his left. We disengaged and came at each other the same way again. I pressed to his right this time, trying to feel him out. There were a few more tentative, probing passes, then the fight shifted gears rapidly, heating up in a hurry.

This time it was real fencing, not the hurried hackwork my earlier encounters had been. The practiced routine brought its own sort of comfort. We fought at reach. We fought
corps à corps
. The long swords smashed into each other in combination after combination, at every possible angle, the shock of impact jarring my wrists and sending signals of pain all the way up arms that soon started to feel like lead weights. That was different from my earlier fights with Dragon’s Death too. Before, the sword had seemed almost weightless. After a few minutes this time, I could feel the full weight of the claymore. Maneuvering the sword, parrying the elflord, got harder. I met each of his attacks with less leeway, less leverage. It wasn’t hard to project the outcome. Soon I would miss a parry and the elflord’s blade would slice through me the way I had sliced troll and dwarf with Dragon’s Death.

I had to find an edge if I wanted to get out of the duel alive. I would have liked to slip a hand grenade down the front of his tights, but I didn’t have a grenade handy and I couldn’t be sure it would work if I did.

Something
.

I followed a parry with a quick step toward Xayber, and our blades locked at the guard.

Surprise!
Xayber hadn’t been expecting me to close like that. He could have rested his chin on top of my head … if he had leaned over a little. He was that much taller than me. His sword pressed in and down on mine. His weight pushed forward, trying to force me to step back. He had the weight, but my being two feet shorter gave me a slight advantage in leverage the way we were locked together.

Then the elflord disappeared from sight. I could still feel the pressure of his sword and body, but I couldn’t see him. I
could
still see myself, an image of myself, standing a little beyond, holding the elf sword at an angle, hilt on the ground, point angled toward my gut. I saw myself fall on the blade, saw the point spring out of my back—about where I had been injured before—at the center of a fountain of bright red blood. The vision multiplied until I could see hundreds of copies of myself in all the phases of committing suicide. Miniatures, drive-in-movie-screen size, everything in between, over and over and over. Then the pictures started to strobe—again, over and over. I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed against the invisible elflord. When I opened my eyes again, he was back—grinning. He gave way and we went through another short passage at reach. I didn’t feel quite as drained as before. The sideshow had given me time to catch my second wind.

Then the elflord changed himself into a copy of me and I dueled with myself. The absurdity of that gave me a lift.

“Gee, I even get to costar with myself,” I said—or grunted, one word at a time. “Think of all the movie stars who never got to try a dual role.”

The elflord returned at that, but he wasn’t grinning any longer. We continued to fight, going one way and then the other. My whistling got louder, more intense. So did his. It seemed to give us both new strength. Seeing him nonplussed did me worlds of good too, but that and the “new strength” were both relative. The fight was beginning to get to me.

“So. You’re more than you appear to be.” Xayber forced a disengagement and stepped back out of reach of a lunge. I brought my sword up in a salute and tried to spread a grin across my face. From the reaction I got, I guess it worked.

“You don’t recognize my magic?” I don’t know what brought that comment out of me, but I loaded it with obviously mock surprise. “You must be slipping. Shall we have another go? I think it’s time Xayber belonged to a lord more fit to hold it.” I took two quick steps toward him and lunged at his throat. He backed out of reach again, brought his sword up to his face, and vanished. The gray and the light went with him.

I collapsed across Lesh.

15
Coriander

Lesh woke noisily when I fell on him, and that woke the others. I was so wiped out that I couldn’t move, not even an arm. Limp, exhausted, turned inside out, I could scarcely mumble answers to the questions that Lesh and Annick fired off. On top of all that, my back was hurting again—worse than ever. Falling across Lesh hadn’t helped.

Annick guessed what had happened. “He’s been caught by the elflord. We’ve got to get him away from here as fast as we can.”

That sounded good to me, but the three of them had to do all of the work. It’s a good thing we had unloaded only the essentials. I was baggage, useless, as if I didn’t have a bone or muscle left—Dorothy’s Scarecrow with his stuffing ripped out. The others even had to hoist me into the saddle and tie me in place. When we rode out, Harkane was at my side to make sure I didn’t fall. He held the reins of my horse.

Annick led the way with her night vision. Harkane and I were close behind her, and Lesh rode rear guard. For the first hour—maybe longer; time was a nebulous abstraction for me just then—I was scarcely conscious, maybe not even “scarcely” part of the time. There wasn’t much difference between being unconscious and being whatever it was the rest of the time. Perhaps there was less pain while I was completely out of it. But memories of my duel with the elflord haunted me constantly, nightmares that weren’t stilled by waking, and it wasn’t until later that I started to make any sense of it at all.

The duel with Xayber was real. I could have died during it even though I never physically left our camp and the elflord never physically entered. That was why my wound didn’t hurt during my duel. My
body
wasn’t physically involved. It must have remained just standing in place while the fight went on.
I could have died
wore at my mind through the night. There was no question whose magic was more powerful. In my short time as Hero of Varay I had come to rely on my new ability to sense danger, but the elflord had almost completely negated that puny talent as an offhand prelude to his attack. His magic had barely begun when mine ended. The elf sword was a bonus, pure luck. It as the only thing that let me survive the duel. The sword had its own magic, and drawing the weird battle tune from me was only a small part of it.

“You did right good, lord,” Harkane whispered—sometime during that blurry night ride. “You survived the elflord. That means you beat him. Your father never faced a duel like that inside the elflord’s domain, where he’s most powerful.”

I didn’t feel like a winner. At that point, I wasn’t even sure that I felt like a survivor.

I puzzled over the suicide sequence at length, once I started spending more time conscious than not. The only explanation that came close to making sense was that the elflord didn’t think he could kill me by magic alone, and since he wasn’t physically present, all he could hope for was to make me kill myself. I was guessing on insufficient evidence, though. I didn’t know
why
he might have thought that his magic alone wouldn’t suffice—because he thought I was an elf or because he knew I was Hero of Varay, or whatever. There was a chance that he wasn’t certain just who I was. But if he caught me again, his ignorance probably wouldn’t matter. He’d come close enough the first time.

Gradually, I started to get my wits back. Instead of feeling totally sapped and snapped, I just felt exhausted. The pain in my back and side settled into place again, throbbing as steadily as my heart. We stopped to rest the horses. I
think
it was the second time, but it was the first that I was really aware of. I almost managed to dismount by myself. When we got ready to ride again twenty minutes later, I didn’t have to be tied to my saddle. But Lesh and Harkane did have to help me mount.

“What happened?” Annick asked after we started riding south again. She rode at my side long enough to hear my semicoherent tale. I needed quite a while to tell it. I ate a little beef jerky and drank a lot of water along the way. That helped.

“I was right, it was the elflord,” Annick said when I finished.

“We have to be out of Fairy before he comes for me again. There’s no way I could survive that a second time.”

“I think we’ll be south of the swamp by dawn,” Annick said. “Do you want to turn east and try to stay hidden in the forest again?”

“Trees won’t hide me from him.” I may have shuddered at that. We rode on for a few minutes before I continued talking. I had to do some thinking, and rational thought came hard.

“Let’s just make the best speed we can, straight south—unless he sends troops after us. And we’re not going straight to Arrowroot. That’s too dangerous.” Particularly with me useless for combat. “We’ll try Coriander instead. We can get in and out of your uncle’s castle quickly from there.” Or from Basil, if it came down to that, I thought. I told Annick about the feeling of danger I had had when we first left Arrowroot, before she joined us. I didn’t want to head into that without knowing what was behind it.

“I guess I should react to that,” Annick said. “My mother and my uncle are there.” She paused, then added, “But I don’t feel any of the things I should. Does that shock you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“There’ll be fighting at Arrowroot, right?” she asked.

“Probably. The elflord has obviously found some magic that works inside Varay, at least as far as Arrowroot.” That was another complication. If Arrowroot was under active attack, I wouldn’t be able to take soldiers from there to fight the Etevar, and the entire foray into Xayber might be wasted.

“Coriander faces Xayber too,” Annick said. “The danger might be there as well.”

“Maybe, but maybe we won’t be expected to head there.”

We rested for a couple of hours just after dawn, near the edge of the forest. I managed to sleep most of that time. When I woke, I felt stronger even though my back and side still hurt. Annick rebandaged my wound and said that it had been bleeding again.

“Probably from when I fell on Lesh after the duel with the elflord,” I said, and she nodded.

When I had new tape on, I managed to get up and walk around a bit. I wasn’t up to anything strenuous yet, but I thought I would be able to take care of routine. Annick had caught several plump fish while I slept. I’ve never liked sushi, but I ate my share of the raw fish. There was no time for a fire, and I wasn’t ready to chance even one of Lesh’s “guaranteed smokeless” fires yet.

We rode almost continuously for another two days and the night in between, resting only when we had to. By sunset the following day, people and horses were all dragging. I’d like to say I was feeling a lot better by then, but the best I can honestly manage is that I didn’t feel any
worse
. The back of a horse isn’t all that conducive to recuperation. With the burst of hard riding, though, maybe the pursuit (if there was any pursuit) would be too far behind to matter. That was the hope, why I was willing to keep going even though I was hurting. Anyway, we saw riders only once, and we were able to get under cover before they spotted us, thanks to Annick’s eyesight and my returning awareness of danger. I didn’t feel any probes from the elflord.

Luckily.

Eventually, we had to make a longer stop, spend the night in one place. We followed a small stream deep into the forest, wading two miles upstream. We were in place well before sunset. Harkane and Annick caught fish and a few tidbits that looked like crayfish. I let Lesh start another of his smokeless fires—but said that we had to douse it before it got completely dark, even though our campsite was so isolated. Harkane went off into the woods and came back with his helmet full of berries that looked like raspberries and tasted like peaches.

“The way we’ve been going, another day and a half might get us to Varay,” Annick said while we were eating. “Or a day and a night.”

“I don’t want the horses dropping under us in the stretch,” I said.

“You think we’ll have trouble close to the end?” Annick asked—almost meekly, and that surprised me enough to give her a long stare.

“I’d almost bet on it,” I said. “If the elflord’s armies are really on the attack, we may have to go through them at either Coriander or Arrowroot.” Usually, my guesses don’t work out, but I might have been a card-carrying prophet with that one.

We had a quiet night and a peaceful ride the next day. The quiet night especially helped me. Then, after sleeping for half of the following night, we got an early start for our last day on the isthmus. Of course, we were also nearing the area that the chamberlain’s map labeled “Here there be dragons,” but I didn’t take that very seriously. It’s not that I felt cocky after administering the
coup de grâce
to one dragon—I knew that didn’t qualify me as a proper dragon slayer—it’s just that dragons didn’t seem to tie themselves to any one spot. They didn’t have to. They were arguably the “meanest SOBs in the valley,” so they could go wherever they damn well pleased.

I knew we were getting close to Varay because I could feel the danger in front of us increase slowly, mile by mile, as we headed south. It was like a chronic ache rather than a sudden pain, and I had experienced enough of both kinds of pain lately to know the difference. That last night that we camped in Fairy—the half-night—I slept like the dead, not fully recovered from my duel with the elflord or from my physical wounds. I intended to take my turn as sentry to show the others that I was really recovering, but my companions vetoed it. Not that I argued very hard. A good Basilier meal would help. I found myself thinking about food a lot. I was looking forward to a chance to pig out again—too much of too many kinds of food too fast, washed down with about a barrel of beer. I think food was on everyone’s mind.