What were they going to do with their captives? She would never find out hidden here behind Reynard's barrel. What should she do? Send to Camelot for help? There were a whole townful of people perfectly able to ride to Camelot—they didn't need her for that. But did they know the phoenix symbol any better than she? Would they be able to tell rescuers where to look? And fast upon that she thought: A little more time spent thinking, and I'll he too late to do anything.
She squeezed her eyes even tighter and rubbed the ring. Merlin had said she didn't need to rub, but it made her feel more confident.
Casting glamours always made her a bit dizzy, and—before she was quite ready—she took a step out into the open to steady herself.
The leader of the knights looked over. Nimue glanced down at her new body, which looked like that of a seventeen-year-old boy wearing loose homespun.
Too late for second thoughts.
She was grabbed and flung across a horse, like a carcass, like a bag of gram. It had seemed a better plan before it actually started.
Merlin, help me. What should I do? she thought as her ankles were bound. She knew that her indecisiveness had no doubt already cost her opportunities. Yet it was Merlin who had always been after her to keep her wits about her. Merlin could think of several things at once.
Perhaps, she thought, if she remained calm and accompanied the knights without fighting, she might be able to help the other captives later on. Wait and see might, after all, be the best immediate course of action. Never one to try to fool herself, Nimue knew it was also the easiest.
CHAPTER 2
Nimue wished for their well-being so earnestly and so continually that by the time the knights finally halted, she had a headache.
Fortunately, maintaining the glamour that made her look like a boy of St. George required almost no effort. Still, as she was set on her feet along with the others, she swayed dizzily as the blood rushed out of her head and redistributed itself normally. At least she didn't fall.
And at least none of the real young men in the group said anything to draw the knights' attention to her, though they must have wondered who she was, to have suddenly appeared in St. George of the Hills just in time to be captured along with them.
They were in a castle courtyard. She looked around through eyes that wouldn't quite focus. She didn't need sharp focus to see it was a place she immediately disliked. The windows were tiny, high up, and few. The walls were crenelated to provide cover for archers, and the group had passed through three portcullises to get this far. The whole place bristled with guards and armaments. All castles were set up for the possibility of war, but few castellans felt the need to let function dominate form so completely. Either the countryside or the castle inhabitants themselves had to be decidedly unfriendly.
"Ay!" a voice shouted at her. Before she could act on the realization that this was the second time she had been called, one of the knights jerked her toward the doorway.
They went—somehow she had guessed it would be so—down. They had to go single file on the steep stairs, their shoulders brushing rough masonry. The stairs were crudely made—different heights, different lengths—and were badly worn.
Almost at the end of the line, except for a guard, Nimue concentrated on not falling. She didn't dare wish not to fall because that could result in too many unforeseen possibilities—such as dying before she had a chance to fall. Dying seemed too close a possibility for her to tempt fate like that. So she watched her feet rather than where the group was headed, and bumped into Dolph when he stopped suddenly.
The lead guard banged the butt of his torch on the armored door before them. "Ay, you awake?" he yelled.
A voice from the other side grumbled an answer that Nimue couldn't make out, then the door opened, releasing a smell of cold, damp earth.
"Well, took your time, didn't you?" the dungeon guard complained to their escort. He lightly tossed and caught a set of dice while, behind him, two more guards waited impatiently for him to complete his throw. "His worship has been fit to gnaw the masonry all afternoon."
The knight in the lead brushed by him. "Move," he told the prisoners. He had to reach over one of the seated guards to get the ring of keys that hung on a nail in the wall. "Simpleton," he growled at the man.
The guard looked neither vexed nor interested.
By the time Nimue passed through the guard room, the three guards had their backs to the procession, only interested in finishing their game. So, she thought, whole groups of prisoners were nothing unusual. That was a worrisome notion.
They made their way down a damp corridor lined with cells, stopping at a door just within the glow of the guard area torches. The lead knight unlocked the door.
"Welcome to Ravens' Rock," he announced, playing at the role of unctuous host. "May your stay be long and profitable."
Ravens' Rock. Ravens' Rock. The name meant nothing to her.
The guard in the back pushed, and the seven prisoners shuffled forward into the unlighted room. One of the knights slammed the door.
Nimue, still at the back of the line, only got one quick impression—that the room was just barely large enough to accommodate them. Then the knights took their torches with them, so that the only light they had was the dim reflection from the torches in the guards' area, about the same illumination as on a cloudy moonless night: just enough light to keep from walking into each other.
The young wainwright sank to his knees, cradling his broken hand. Skittering noises hinted of vermin, but Nimue could also hear bigger noises, albeit still quiet ones, that told of other people present.
Eventually Nimue's eyes grew accustomed to the dark. There were two others in the cell besides the St. George group huddled by the door.
Trying to deepen her voice to sound like a youth, since her glamour affected only her outward appearance, she asked, "Does anybody know why we're here?"
The two unknown men looked at each other but said nothing.
"Can anybody guess why we're here?" asked someone from her group. He was a lanky youth, one of Roswald's sons, Evan or Hugh. She knew the family but there were six sons and two young daughters, each with curly red hair and lots of teeth, and she could never keep straight who was who. Whichever this one was, Nimue was glad to know that there was at least one here who wasn't dumbfounded by shock.
A sudden commotion commenced in the hall; someone was banging on the stairway door, and the guards answered that they were on their way.
The two original prisoners dropped to their knees and started in on the Confiteor, prayed in fervent, if mostly unintelligible, Latin. It was contagious. Though no one from the St. George group knew what was going on, by the time the door to their cell was thrown open, five had begun prayers for divine intervention. In the bright light of the torches, Nimue looked and saw that it was Roswald's son who remained standing with her.
Four heavily armed knights entered.
And an old man.
The old man needed the support of both an attendant and a wooden staff, and still he seemed barely able to shuffle into the cell. His hand on the staff was badly misshapen. Though she couldn't be sure, Nimue thought that some of the fingers had missing joints, and others were fused together. Then he raised his head. His face was badly wrinkled, like a wadded piece of parchment.
But all that was as nothing.
Neither was her attention drawn to the fact that the right side of his face was almost a handbreadth lower than the left, nor that one eye was only a tremulous slit while the other moved constantly, inspecting the occupants of the room.
The single fact that filled her whole awareness was a sort of alarm that had gone off inside her head, an alarm that clanged and warned she was in dangerous proximity to a strong source of magic.
Now, she thought about Merlin's ring. If ever, now. But what, exactly, should she do now? Merlin had always urged caution, and one of the guards was already shouting at the kneeling Dolph: "Down! Get your hands down from your
face so we can see!"
The old man—he was most certainly a wizard—evaluated Dolph, then his one good eye lingered on Nimue. How could she have been unaware of a wizard of this caliber?
Her heart thudded madly, and she wondered if she had set off some warning bell in his head also, so that he looked beyond her boy's exterior and recognized the presence of magic in her. But, if so, it must have been such a small alarm: She was young and inexperienced and most of what little innate ability she had was already occupied with Merlin.
His gaze slid off her and passed on to the youth standing next to her. "You've done well," he told the knights. His voice was a low rumble, spoken through cracked lips that barely moved.
He passed his staff to his attendant, then pulled some sort of red crystal from inside his robes. He held that in one hand and put his other on the shoulder of the youth next to her—Evan, Nimue had finally decided. The farm boy stood firm and met the wizard's gaze with a frightened but defiant steadiness. The old man's half-lowered eyelid fluttered, and his fingers dug into the boy's shoulder hard enough to cause a flicker of pain to show through the youth's resolve.
And the pain and clamor in Nimue's head felt as though it would cause her head to explode. She found herself on her knees with her companions. Let the guards take it for another prayerful gesture. Too late, too late, an inner voice taunted. What had her caution cost this time?
And yet still she didn't know what to wish. Even to wish for Evan's safety could be disastrous, could result in Evan's death—for what can threaten a man's safety once he is dead?
The wizard was standing straighter and taller, and his victim was writhing but evidently unable to break away. He turned toward Nimue as though he recognized that if anybody could help him, it should have been she.
A red haze filmed her eyes, through which she could make out his face, also transformed with pain. But then she saw it: no, not by pain alone. One of Evan's eyes looked about wildly for help that wasn't there, and the other eye, half closed, seemed to be moving downward on his face, which was crumpling even as she watched. She forced her gaze upward, beyond the strong hand clenched on Evan's shoulder, beyond the other hand still closed around the ruby pendant, to the wizard's face. It was not only young and virile, it was fast taking on the contours and angles that had been the young Evan's.
"No!" she screamed, or thought she did; she couldn't be sure above the clamor in her own head.
Evan, now crumpled and old, slid to the floor.
The wizard, now wearing the face shared by all Roswald's children, finally let go. He stretched his new body, wiggled his fingers, rose on his toes, laughed in exhilarated joy. "Good," he said, either to himself or to the knights. "Very good."
Then he stooped down, hands on knees, and leaned close to Evan, whose old, deformed body was wracked by convulsions. "Thank you," he said, though the boy had not been a willing participant, and was obviously beyond hearing. During the time it took the wizard to tuck the ruby and its chain back into his shirt, Evans convulsions subsided to twitching and spasms. And then he lay perfectly still.
The wizard straightened and half danced his way to the door.
But he turned back once to look directly at Nimue. "Later," he said.
CHAPTER 3
Two of the knights grabbed hold of Evan's body by the ankles and pulled it out of the cell. The other two knights backed out and closed the door behind, leaving the prisoners once more in the darkness.
Unsteadily, Nimue got back to her feet. My fault, she thought. My fault. She should have done something. If only she were better at thinking. But she could not let herself be paralyzed by guilt. She found the two young men who had been in the cell before them. Though she looked like a youth herself, she had only her own physical strength. Still, she was angry and frightened enough not to need magic to take hold of the nearer youth by the shirt and haul him up to face her—all without knowing a moment beforehand what she planned.
His teeth were already rattling even before she shook him. "Who was that man? Why do they need all of us here? Answer me." She didn't remember to make her voice deeper, but it was husky from emotion, and the others may not have noticed. She tried to tell herself that if this youth had spoken up earlier, before the wizard had entered, she wouldn't have been so taken by surprise and she might have been able to react quicker. But even as she framed the thought, she knew it was cowardice to blame her hesitation on anyone besides herself.
"We don't know." It was the other who spoke, not the one she held. "We don't know who he be. He ain't never said his name."
Nimue took it for peasants logic rather than sarcasm. She let go of the shirt. That man still remained tongue-tied, while the other continued, "Whoever he be, whatever be the matter with him"—Nimue could almost feel the young man's shudder—"this ... this thing he does don't last. He'll be back in ten-day looking much the same again. Usually not so bad. He come down once already yesterday and twice today. He looked over me and Griffith here, and he said he'd give 'em till sunset to bring in something better." Obviously the slight was preferable to what they had just witnessed happening to Evan. Any delay was gain.
Neither man was repulsive, though both were too thin, too short, too irregular in their features to be attractive. Could that be a way out? Nimue put her hand on his shoulder. "Look ... What's your name?"
"Wystan."
"Wystan. Apparently the man is vain about what face he wears. Has anybody tried to work on that?"
"Eh?"
"Has anyone tried to..." She tried to think of examples. "Perhaps foul up his hair or..." She twisted her jaw and put on a simple look that she wasn't at all sure he could understand, much less see in this light. "Or do something—"
"Bryce banged his face into the wall and knocked out three front teeth."
Nimue winced. "Yes, well, something like that."
"Wizard—he got angry. Bryce ain't here no more."
Right. She sighed. She asked Wystan, "Has anybody ever tried to overcome the guards?"
"William. He ain't here no more neither."
Nimue had no answer to that. Ten days. The wizard would be back in ten days. Could help get to them before that?
She stooped down to feel the earthen floor. In the gloom she tried to pick out details on the far wall of their cell.
Affecting people's minds was the easiest—if the people weren't expecting it. She had done it a few times as a child, for childish reasons, and once shortly after meeting Merlin.
"Never do that again" he had warned, sounding both frightened and angry "Absolutely, positively never. You go leaping into people's minds, and there's no telling what damage you can accidentally do Try to get some anonymous peasant to lower the price of his rutabagas for you, and you might end up changing his entire destiny. And suppose he was eventually going to do something important. Or to sire somebody important. Or to encourage somebody to do something important. Why, you might prevent the invention of the wheel. Think of the sociopolitical consequences on the price of rutabagas if the wheel were never invented."
"But, Merlin," she had said, "the wheel has already BEEN invented. And besides, rutabagas don't grow here. You mean turnips. I hate turnips."
"Don't,"he had said, "be obtuse."
"You be some lord's son or something?"
"What?" Wystan's question caused the wall to retreat back into the darkness, the image of Merlin overshadowed.
"You talk like gentrys, and the others—they sez they don't know you."
She had thought only a moment had passed while she'd been thinking and that he had been by her side all along. But the others were gathered closer around, and Wystan was now before her instead of beside. "My name is Nevil," she told him—told all of them. Some sort of explanation was definitely called for; but she couldn't trust them with the truth—or certainly not all of it. Nimue of Camelot was too valuable a hostage. To these men with whom she shared the cell, the prospect of ending up like Evan would be strong incentive
to try to bargain with the wizard. "I work for Everard the fabric merchant. We had just arrived when the knights came. Now please get out of my way."
"Everard travels alone," said one from the St. George group.
"Thought so" someone behind her agreed. So far they sounded more confused than skeptical. So far they were just trying to work things out.
Nimue said, "Well, he doesn't work alone anymore. Could you stand aside please?"
"But..." said Dolph.
"Get out of my way!" she screamed at them.
Everyone backed off.
Still, it wasn't wasted time. From trying to make out their faces as they spoke, her eyes had become better adjusted. She located a spider web in the corner between the ceiling and the wooden beam that braced it. Her eyes picked out an individual strand, then a drop of moisture that hung from that strand. This was supposed to be one of the simple spells, she reminded herself. She let pinpricks of color form, focused on the blue-gold ones, and consciously raised her body temperature. A tiny puff of smoke momentarily obscured the spot she needed, but she continued to see it in her mind. Someone was shaking her shoulder, yelling directly into her ear. She successfully blocked that, along with the other background noise. Finally, the illusion took. Reality merged with thought, and the semblance of fire she had created consumed the spider web. Then the flames dropped to the floor, igniting the wood and straw bedding in the far corner of the cell.
"Nevil, Nevil! Back off! You're too close." It was Dolph who shook her while the others banged on the door and screamed, "Fire!"
For a moment she was confused, couldn't understand why Dolph looked at her and called a man's name, but then he was dragging her to her feet, away from the heat of the flames.
The three dungeon guards were just outside. "Move," the one in command called. "You're blocking the door." If they had been ordinary prisoners of an ordinary castle, the guards probably would just have let the fire burn out—taking bedding and prisoners with it, since it would be unable to burn the stone walls and go beyond this one cell. But they were valuable. The wizard wanted them, and wanted them unmarred.