The Silver Mage (43 page)

“I can. I wondered about them myself, when first I saw them.”

Kov laid aside his bundle and took off his boots, then waded into the shallows, clothes and all. While he washed, Kov paused often to tell Rori about the Dwrgwn and the fortress, though the story came out in jumbled bits and pieces. Once he was reasonably clean, Kov seemed calmer, but still his hands shook as he brushed the moss off the inscribed pillar. He hunkered down and studied the letters, an act which finally soothed his troubled mind.

“Now this is fascinating,” Kov said. “It says that this bridge was built by someone named Brennos and the council of something called vergobretes. Isn’t that your King Bran?”

“It is, and the vergobretes became gwerbretion.” Rori lay down on his stomach and rested his massive head on the ground, the only way that he could get his eyes close enough to the pillar to read the words that showed his ancestors had marched across this river over a thousand years before. “Here, Envoy, there’s a thing that’s bothered me for years. When I went to Lin Serr, I saw upon the doors the tale of the destruction of Lin Rej. One of the pictures clearly showed that the people of Bel were to blame for stirring up the Meradan in the first place.”

“That, alas, is indeed the case.”

“But the Westfolk didn’t know that when first I joined them. Salamander had puzzled it out, but no one else. How did your people discover the truth?”

“Let me think.” Kov fell silent, but his lips moved as if he were running through memory chains of lore. “A long, long time ago, there was a healer named Vela. She’d heard the truth from a woman of the Deverrians who was a healer, too.” He frowned, considering. “Now, this all happened so long ago that the tale’s not very complete. I think that this healer told Vela as she, the Deverrian I mean, lay dying. Her name’s not been remembered, you see.”

Could it have been Hwilli?
Rori thought. Her memory glimmered deep in his dragon mind, like a gold coin fallen into a stream and seen through running water.
She considered herself one of us by the end.
Kov was continuing to talk about the Great Migration of men and dwarves both.

“So this bridge,” the envoy finished up, “has great significance as to the rightful lords of this stretch of countryside. It gives your king a claim on this stretch of country, not that the Horsekin will just give it over or suchlike.”

“True spoken. I doubt me if the High King has the men to take it or hold it. It’s not of much use to us.”

“Not now, but who knows what the future will bring?”

“You have a point. Who knows what the gods will give us? But for now, I see you’ve got a good length of rope. You’ll have to find some way to tie yourself onto my back, because we’d best be on our way before the Horsekin or the Dwrgwn come after you.”

Once Kov had wedged himself between two of the spikes at Rori’s shoulder blades, and tied himself down to boot, Rori launched himself into the air. He was expecting Kov to scream, but the dwarf merely clutched the fleshy spike in front of him a little tighter. During their long day’s flight, Kov never complained once, a relief after the way Mic had moaned and screeched during the journey to the Red Wolf dun.

By sunset they reached the Dwrvawr and passed over the wattle and daub huts of the northern Dwrgi village. Kov yelled a few curses down upon them all, though doubtless no one could hear him. Rori made sure to lair that night far from the river among the rocky hills, where the Dwrgwn had no reason to go. In the morning they set off again for the east and Haen Marn. Eventually, somewhere in the afternoon, Rori’s massive stomach began rumbling. He found a little valley and landed beside a stream far too shallow to harbor any Dwrgwn.

“I need to hunt,” Rori told Kov. “Do you have food?”

“A few bits of stale bread,” Kov said. “I might be able to catch a fish or two from this stream.”

“If I find a deer, there’ll be plenty of meat for both of us. See if you can find some firewood. I doubt me if you’ll want to eat it raw.”

Kov mugged sheer disgust and agreed.

With summer blooming on the hills, deer proved easy to find. Toward evening Rori spotted a herd, come out to graze on a grassy hillside. Hovering at the edge was a young stag. The herd’s prime stag would lower his antlers and run a few steps toward the intruder, who would back off, only to sneak back when the elder returned to his meal. Rori waited until the young stag had retreated some distance from the herd, then plunged down and struck. One quick nip at the back of the neck, and the rival stag hung limp and dead in his claws. The herd scattered, bounding off in all directions. He ignored them and carried his prey back to Kov and their improvised camp.

Kov had managed to scrape together enough wood to cook a few gobbets of venison on a pointed green stick. While they ate, he repeated the things he’d experienced since his kidnapping all over again, but in proper order this time.

“You’re telling me, then,” Rori said, “that these otter folk have dweomer.”

“Of a sort. Very much of a sort.”

“All this cursed dweomer!” Rori paused for a long snarl that made Kov rise to a kneel, ready to run. “My apologies!” Rori said. “It just aches my heart, all these strange things I can’t understand.”

“Mine, too.” Kov sat back down again. “The world was so much simpler when I thought dweomer only a folktale.”

On the morrow, Rori’s heart found more to ache over when they came in sight of Haen Marn. Years before, when in human form he’d seen the island, it had appeared to him as an ordinary-looking hillock of dirt and rock rising out of a lake of ordinary-looking water. With his dragon’s sight, he now saw the truth.

A huge vortex of astral force shimmered before him, a twisted, convoluted mass of glimmering silver-and-gold threads. At moments, the island appeared as he remembered it, but the image swiftly dissolved into the play of astral forces brought down and twined upon the physical plane. The entire construct glittered with strange blue lights and flashes of a pale purple unlike any natural color he’d ever seen, whether as a man or a dragon. Every now and then he heard sounds, too, a snatch of music once, a high-pitched whistling at other times. He understood only a little, not how it had been constructed but that it had been constructed, not why it was dangerous, but that it was extremely dangerous to such as him, a less than natural form.

Rori swung wide around the vortex and saw on the lakeshore a clump of shimmering gray lines forming the boulder with the silver horn. He called out to Kov to hold on tightly, then swooped down and landed near it. The dwarven envoy slid down from his back.

“There’s a silver horn on that rock,” Kov said.

“It’ll summon a boat that will take you to the island,” Rori said. “I think I’ll just stay here rather than fly over. Could you do me a favor?”

“But of course!”

“Tell the lady of the isle, Angmar her name is, that I’m here. She may want to come over and speak with me.”

The inhabitants of the island, however, had already seen them. Before Kov could even blow the summoning horn, the dragon boat set out from the pier to the sound of its brass gong, booming over the silent lake to frighten the water beasts away. Rori could discern Lon, still in charge of the rowers after all these years. His etheric-tinged sight told him something else, too, that only one of the rowers existed as a solid, real person. The others, like the island, had been woven and crimped together out of the flickering lines of silver and gold energies.

As the boat came nearer, he could discern two women standing in the bow. One he recognized as Avain, grown tall and hugely stout, her hair puffed out from her beefy face like a dragon’s frill. The other was Angmar, slender and frail, her hair half-silver now, but Angmar nonetheless. The way his heart seemed to turn over in his chest told him what his decision was bound to be.

“I wish she’d not see me like this,” Rori said.

“Why not?” Kov said. “She’s known the truth for some months now, or so Mic told me. She lives in the midst of marvels, Rori. I think me she’ll understand.”

“Perhaps so. But I feel shamed nonetheless.”

The boat came as close to shore as it dared. Avain jumped down into the rocky shallows and caught her mother as easily as a woman might catch a little child. As they splashed ashore, Lon called out orders. The dragon boat backed water, holding its place. Avain set her mother down on the shore, then rushed over to Rori. Her green, strangely lashless eyes were huge with excitement.

“A dragon,” she said. “You be a dragon!”

“I am at that,” Rori said.

She clapped her hands and did a little jigging dance in front of him. He could see a bare faint shadow or mist in the sunlight, a dragon form hovering around her, but he had no idea what might have produced or caused it. Kov had arranged a polite if frozen smile as he watched Avain.

Angmar walked up slowly and laid a hand on her daughter’s hip.

“Avain?” Angmar said. “You go back now. You did promise Mama.”

“Avain go back. Avain be a good girl. Avain did see the dragon.”

Angmar turned to Kov, who bowed to her.

“Will you take the hospitality of the island?” Angmar said softly. “I be eager to speak to my lord alone.”

“Gladly, my lady,” Kov said. “I’d rather not intrude.”

Kov waded out and threw his bundle up to Lon, then boarded, clambering over the side. Avain took a step away from her mother, looked back, still grinning in delight, then hurried to the shore and splashed back out to the dragon boat. She climbed aboard with Lon and Kov’s help. At a few crisp orders from Lon, the boat turned and glided away, leaving Rori and Angmar alone, facing each other.

With a sigh, Rori settled onto his stomach, tucked his front legs into his chest, and lowered his head so they could see each other at her level. Gray mottled her pale hair, yet he could see her familiar strength when she smiled at him. Her beauty had always lain in her strength, her ability to endure and still smile.

“Well, your eyes, they be the same,” Angmar said. “Larger, but human enough.”

“They are, truly. My love, forgive me.”

“Be this your own doing?”

“It wasn’t, but I did naught to turn it aside.”

She laid one hand on his jaw and stroked it. Her touch felt cool, comfortable in such a familiar way that he remembered her stroking his human face with the same gesture. Without hands, he could do nothing to caress her in return. A touch from his massive paw would likely have knocked her to the ground.

“I did return before,” he said. “Once I’d captured the dragon I was sent to find, I returned, but the island was gone.”

“Enj did tell me so. Rori, I do blame you for naught.”

His eyes filled with tears. He shook his head to scatter them. “My thanks,” he managed to say. “A thousand thanks.”

“Enj did tell me that the elven folk be trying to take the dweomer off you.”

“They are, and truly, I think me they can succeed. It’s not without its dangers, but if they do, then I’ll return to Haen Marn for good this autumn, at the waning of the war.”

Her smile broke through the mist of age. At that moment he could only think of her as young and beautiful, as lovely in her way as his daughter was in hers.

“I’ll be an old man, no doubt,” he said.

“And am I not an old woman? If we do get a few years of peace together, then I shall be content.”

“So shall I.” He repeated the words, marveling at them. “So shall I.”

A
t the pier, the dragon boat deposited Kov and Avain, then pulled away, ready to go fetch its mistress at her signal. Kov slung his bundle over his shoulder and followed the young giantess—as he thought of Avain—up the path toward the manse. She was chanting a little song in Dwarvish, “Avain saw the dragon, Avain saw the dragon,” so happily that he had to smile. His native language sounded so sweet that he suddenly realized how much he’d missed it, whether speaking Deverrian or trying to make sense of the Dwrgwn’s chattering tongue.
I’ve been an exile,
he thought,
but I’m nearly home.

Framed by the open door, a young woman, her raven-dark hair pinned up on her head, her slender frame draped in a blue-and-gray plaid, stood on the steps of the manse. For a brief moment Kov thought she was Berwynna, but when she walked down the path toward them, the difference in her carriage and manner showed him his mistake. Unlike Wynni’s confident stride, her walk was graceful, her smile shy instead of boyish.
Her twin,
he thought,
Mara
.

“There’s a good girl,” Mara called out, also in Dwarvish. “Avain, will you come into the manse?”

“Avain go to her tower,” Avain said. “Avain saw the dragon, Mara.”

“I know, and I’m so glad you did. Can you find your tower door?”

“Avain knows her tower, Mara.”

She skipped off, a lumbering gait that reminded Kov of a dragon waddling on the ground, and disappeared around the corner of the manse. Mara smiled with a brief shake of her head.