The workhouse was crammed with workbenches and bodies and smelled of stale air and sweat. Dust lay over everything, and the lamplight shone dully against walls that were dingy and unwashed. The Dwarf women were huddled on the floor with cups of soup and plates of bread in hand, finishing their dinner. Heads and eyes turned hurriedly as the two Federation soldiers entered, then turned just as quickly away again. Morgan caught the unmistakable look of fear and loathing.
“Call their names,” he ordered the aide.
The aide did so, his voice echoing in the cavernous room and near the back two hunched forms came slowly to their feet.
“Now wait outside for me,” Morgan said.
The aide hesitated, then disappeared back through the doors.
Morgan waited anxiously as Granny Elise and Auntie Jilt made their way gingerly through the clutter of bodies, benches, and pallets to where he stood. He barely recognized them. Their clothes were in tatters. Granny Elise’s fine gray hair was unkempt, as if it were fraying all around the edges; Auntie Jilt’s sharp, birdlike face was pinched and harsh. They were bent over with more than age, moving so slowly that it appeared it hurt them even to walk.
They came up to him with their eyes downcast and stopped.
“Granny,” he said softly. “Auntie Jilt.”
They looked up slowly and their eyes widened. Auntie Jilt caught her breath. “Morgan!” Granny Elise whispered in wonder. “Child, it’s really you!”
He bent down quickly then and took them in his arms, hugging them close. They collapsed into him, rag dolls lacking strength of their own, and he could hear them both begin to cry. Behind them, the other Dwarf women were staring in confusion.
Morgan eased the two old ladies gently away. “Listen now,” he said softly. “We haven’t much time. I’ve tricked the watch captain into releasing you into my custody, but he’s liable to catch on if we give him the chance so we have to hurry. Do you have somewhere that you can go to hide, someplace you won’t be found?”
Auntie Jilt nodded, her narrow face a mask of determination. “The Resistance will hide us. We still have friends.”
“Morgan, where’s Steff?” Granny Elise interrupted.
The Highlander forced himself to meet her urgent gaze. “I’m sorry, Granny. Steff is dead. He was killed fighting against the Federation in the Dragon’s Teeth.” He saw the pain that filled her eyes. “Teel is dead, too. She was the one who killed Steff. She wasn’t what any of us thought, I’m afraid. She was a creature called a Shadowen, a thing of dark magic linked to the Federation. She betrayed you as well.”
“Oh, Steff,” Granny Elise whispered absently. She was crying again.
“The soldiers came for us right after you left,” Auntie Jilt said angrily. “They took the children away and put us in this cage. I knew something had gone wrong. I thought you might have been taken as well. Drat it, Morgan, that girl was like our own!”
“I know, Auntie,” he answered, remembering how it had been. “It has become difficult to know who to trust. What about the Dwarves you plan to hide with? Can they be trusted? Are you sure you will be safe?”
“Safe enough,” Auntie replied. “Stop your crying, Else,” she said and patted the other woman’s hand gently. “We have to do as Morgan says and get out of here while we have the chance.”
Granny Elise nodded, brushing away her tears. Morgan stood up again. He stroked each gray head in turn. “Remember, you don’t know me, you’re just my charges until we get clear of this place. And if something goes wrong, if we get separated, go where you’ll be safe. I made a promise to Steff that I would see to it that you did. So you make certain I don’t break that promise, all right?”
“All right, Morgan,” Granny Elise said.
They went out the door then, Morgan leading, the two old ladies shuffling along behind with their heads bowed. The aide was standing rigidly to one side by himself; the guards looked bored. With the Dwarf ladies in tow, Morgan and the aide returned to the administration center. The watch captain was waiting impatiently, the promised release papers clutched in his hand. He passed them across the reception desk to Morgan for his signature, then shoved them at the aide and stalked back into his office. The aide looked at Morgan uncomfortably.
Inwardly congratulating himself on his success, Morgan said, “Major Assomal will be waiting.”
He turned and was in the process of ushering Granny Elise and Auntie Jilt outside when the door opened in front of them and a new Federation officer appeared, this one bearing the crossed bars of a divisional commander.
“Commander Soldt!” The aide leaped to his feet and saluted smartly.
Morgan froze. Commander Soldt was the officer in charge of supervising the confinement of the Dwarves, the ranking officer off the field for the entire garrison. What he was doing at the center at this hour was anybody’s guess, but it was certainly not going to do anything to help further Morgan’s plans.
The Highlander saluted.
“What’s this all about?” Soldt asked, glancing at Granny Elise and Auntie Jilt. “What are they doing out of their quarters?”
“Just a requisition, Commander,” replied the aide. “From Major Assomal.”
“Assomal?” Soldt frowned. “He’s in the field. What would he want with Dwarves…” He glanced again at Morgan. “I don’t know you, soldier. Let me see your papers.”
Morgan hit him as hard as he could. Soldt fell to the floor and lay unmoving. Instantly Morgan went after the aide, who backed away shrieking in terror. Morgan caught him and slammed his head against the desk. The watch captain emerged just in time to catch several quick blows to the face. He staggered back into his office and went down.
“Out the door!” Morgan whispered to Granny Elise and Auntie Jilt.
They rushed from the administration center into the night. Morgan glanced about hurriedly and breathed out sharply in relief. The sentries were still at their posts. No one had heard the struggle. He guided the old ladies quickly along the street, away from the workhouses. A patrol appeared ahead. Morgan slowed, moving ahead of his charges, assuming a posture of command. The patrol turned off before it reached them, disappearing into the dark.
Then someone behind them was shouting, calling for help. Morgan pulled the old ladies into an alleyway and hastened them toward its far end. The shouts were multiplying now, and there was the sound of running feet. Whistles blew and an assembly horn blared.
“They’ll be all over us now,” Morgan muttered to himself.
They reached the next street over and turned onto it. The shouts were all around them. He pulled the ladies into a shadowed doorway and waited. Soldiers appeared at both ends of the street, searching. Morgan’s rescue plans were collapsing about him. His hands tightened into fists. Whatever happened, he couldn’t allow the Federation to recapture Granny and Auntie.
He bent to them. “I’ll have to draw them away,” he whispered urgently. “Stay here until they come after me, then run. Once you’re hidden, stay that way—no matter what.”
“Morgan, what about you?” Granny Elise seized his arm.
“Don’t worry about me. Just do as I say. Don’t come looking for me. I’ll find you when this whole business is over. Goodbye, Granny. Goodbye, Auntie Jilt.”
Ignoring their pleas to remain, he kissed and hugged them hurriedly, and darted into the street. He ran until he caught sight of the first band of searchers and yelled to them, “They’re over here!”
The soldiers came running as he turned down an alleyway, leading them away from Granny Else and Auntie Jilt. He wrenched the broadsword he wore strapped to his back from its scabbard. Breaking free of the alleyway, he caught sight of another band and called them after him as well, gesturing vaguely ahead. To them he was just another soldier—for the moment, at least. If he could just maneuver them ahead of him, he might be able to escape as well.
“That barn, ahead of us,” he shouted as the first bunch caught up with him. “They’re in there!?
??
The soldiers charged past, one knot, then the second. Morgan turned and darted off in the opposite direction. As he came around the corner of a feed building, he ran right up against a third unit.
“They’ve gone into…”
He stopped short. The watch captain stood before him, howling in recognition.
Morgan tried to break free, but the soldiers were on him in an instant. He fought back valiantly, but there was no room to maneuver. His attackers closed and forced him to the ground. Blows rained down on him.
This isn’t working out the way I expected, he thought bleakly and then everything went black.
V
Three days later she who was said to be the daughter of the King of the Silver River arrived in Culhaven. The news of her coming preceded her by half a day and by the time she reached the outskirts of the village the roadway leading in was lined with people for more than a mile. They had come from everywhere—from the village itself, from the surrounding communities of both the Southland and the Eastland, from the farms and cottages of the plains and deep forests, even the mountains north. There were Dwarves and Men and a handful of Gnomes of both sexes and all ages. They were ragged and poor and until now without hope. They jammed the roadside expectantly, some come simply out of a sense of curiosity, most come out of their need to find something to believe in again.
The stories of the girl were wondrous. She had appeared in the heart of the Silver River country close by the Rainbow Lake, a magical being sprung full-blown from the earth. She stopped at each village and town, farm and cottage, and performed miracles. It was said that she healed the land. She turned blackened, withered stalks to fresh, green shoots. She brought flowers to bloom, fruit to bear, and crops to harvest with the smallest of touches. She gave life back to the earth out of death. Even where the sickness was most severe, she prevailed. She bore some special affinity to the land, a kinship that sprang directly from her father’s hands, from the legendary stewardship of the King of the Silver River. For years it had been believed that the spirit lord had died with the passing of the age of magic. Now it was known he had not; as proof he had sent his daughter to them. The people of the Silver River country were to be given back their old life. So the stories proclaimed.
No one was more anxious to discover the truth of the matter than Pe Ell.
It was midday, and he had been waiting for the girl within the shade of the towering old shagbark hickory on a rise at the very edge of town since just after sunrise when word had reached him that today was the day she would appear. He was very good at waiting, very patient, and so the time had gone quickly for him as he stood with the others of the growing crowd and watched the sun lift slowly into the summer sky and felt the heat of the day settle in. Conversation around him had been plentiful and unguarded, and he listened attentively. There were stories of what the girl had done and what it was believed she would do. There were speculations and judgments. The Dwarves were the most vehement in their beliefs—or lack thereof. Some said she was the savior of their people; some said she was nothing more than a Southland puppet. Voices raised in shouts, quarreled, and died away. Arguments wafted through the still, humid air like small explosions of steam out of a fiery earth. Tempers flared and cooled. Pe Ell listened and said nothing.
“She comes to drive out the Federation soldiers and restore our land to us, land that the King of the Silver River treasures! She comes to set us free!”
“Bah, old woman, you speak nonsense! There is nothing to say she is who she claims to be. What do you know of what she can or cannot do?”
“I know what I know I sense what will be.”
“Ha! That’s the ache of your joints you feel, nothing more! You believe what you want to believe, not what is. The truth is that we have no more sense of who this girl is than we do of what tomorrow will bring. It is pointless to get our hopes up!”
“It is more pointless to keep them down!”
And so on, back and forth, an endless succession of arguments and counterarguments that accomplished nothing except to help pass the time. Pe Ell had sighed inwardly. He seldom argued. He seldom had cause to.
When at last she was said to approach, the arguments and conversation faded to mutterings and whispers. When she actually appeared, even the mutterings and whispers died away. A strange hush settled over those who lined the roadway suggesting that either the girl was not at all what they had expected or, perhaps, that she was something more.
She came up the center of the roadway surrounded by the would-be followers who had flocked to her during her journey east, a mostly bedraggled lot with tattered clothes and exhilarated faces. Her own garb was rough and poorly sewn, yet she evinced a radiance that was palpable. She was small and slight, but so exquisitely shaped as to seem not quite real. Her hair was long and silver, shining as water would when it shimmered in the moonlight. Her features were perfectly formed. She walked alone in a rush of bodies that crowded and stumbled about her yet could not bear to approach. She seemed to float among them. Voices called out anxiously to her, but she seemed unaware that anyone was there.
And then she passed by Pe Ell and turned deliberately to look at him. Pe Ell shuddered in surprise. The weight of that look—or perhaps simply the experience of it—was enough to stagger him. Almost immediately her strange black eyes shifted away again, and she was moving on, a sliver of brilliant sunlight that had momentarily left him blind. Pe Ell stared after her, not knowing what she had done to him, what it was that had occurred in that brief moment when their eyes met. It was as if she had looked into his heart and mind and read them quite clearly. It was as if with that single glance she had discovered everything there was to know about him.
He found her to be the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life.
She turned down the roadway into the village proper, the crowd trailing after, and Pe Ell followed. He was a tall, lean man, so thin that he appeared gaunt. His bones were prominent, and the muscles and skin of his body were molded tightly against them so as to suggest he might easily break. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He was as hard as iron. He had a long, narrow face with a hawk nose and a wide forehead with eyebrows set high above hazel eyes that were disarmingly frank to look upon. When he smiled, which was often, his mouth had a slightly lopsided appearance to it. His hair was brown and cropped close, rather spiky and uncontrolled. He slouched a bit when he walked and’ might have been either a gangly boy or a stalking cat. His hands were slim and delicate. He wore common forest clothing made of rough cloth dyed various shades of green and taupe, boots of worn leather laced back and across, and a short cloak with pockets.
He carried no visible weapon. The Stiehl was strapped to his thigh just below his right hip. The knife rode beneath his loose-fitting pants where it could not be seen but where it could be reached easily through a slit cut into a deep forward pocket.
He could feel the blade’s magic warm him.
As he moved to keep up with the girl, people stepped aside—whether from what they saw in his face or the way he moved or the intangible wall they sensed surrounded him. He did not like to be touched, and everyone seemed instinctively to know it. As always, they shied away. He passed through them as a shadow chasing after the light, keeping the girl in sight as he did so, wondering. She had looked at him for a reason, and that intrigued him. He hadn’t been certain what she would be like, how she would make him feel when he saw her for the first time—but he hadn’t thought it would be anything like this. It surprised him, pleased him, and at the same time left him vaguely worried. He didn’t like things that he couldn’t control and he suspected that it would be difficult for anyone to exercise control over her.
Of course, he wasn’t just anyone.
The crowd was singing now, an old song that told of the earth being reborn with the harvesting of new crops, the bearing of food from the fields to the tables of the people who had worked to gather it. There was praise for the seaso
ns, for rain and sun, for the giving of life. Chants rose for the King of the Silver River, the voices grew steadily louder and more insistent. The girl seemed not to hear. She walked through the singing and the cries without responding, making her way first past the houses that lay at the edge of the village, then the larger shops that formed the core of the business center. Federation soldiers began to appear and tried to police the traffic as it surged ahead. They were too few and too ill-prepared, thought Pe Ell. Apparently they had misjudged badly the extent of the community’s response to the coming of the girl.
The Dwarves were feverish in their adoration. It was as if they had been given back the lives that had been stolen from them. A broken, subjugated people for so many years, there had been little enough to happen to give them hope. But this girl seemed to be what they had been waiting for. It was more than the stories, more than the claims of who she was and what she could do. It was the look and feel of her. Pe Ell could sense it as readily as the people who rallied about her. He could feel something of it in himself. She was different from anyone he had ever seen. She had come here for a reason. She was going to do something.
Business ground to a halt in Culhaven as the whole of the village, oppressed and oppressors alike, turned out to discover what was happening and became a part of it. Pe Ell had the sense of a wave gathering force out in the ocean, growing in size until it dwarfed the vast body of water that had given life to it. It was so with this girl. There was a sense of all other events beyond this one ceasing to exist. Everything but what she was faded away and lost meaning. Pe Ell smiled. It was the most wonderful feeling.
The wave swept on through the village, past the shops and businesses, the slave markets, the workhouses, the compounds and soldiers’ quarters, the shabby homes of the Dwarves and the well-kept houses of the Federation officials, down the main thoroughfare, and out again. No one seemed able to guess where it was going. No one but the girl, for she led even at the center of the maelstrom of bodies, guiding somehow the edges of the wave, directing it as she wished. The cries and singing and chants continued unabated, exhilarated, rapturous. Pe Ell marveled.