Oh, she had him. She wanted to shout it out: she had him. He wasn’t iron now, closed and bitter. His fury had receded. He was scrutinizing her intently: perplexed, almost dumbfounded; fundamentally baffled by her; touched by hope.
‘Think about it,’ she murmured to keep herself from crowing aloud.
He opened his mouth, but no words came.
‘You idiot. I did it because I love you.’
Then she reached her arms around his neck and pulled herself up to kiss him.
He took a moment to recover from the shock. Fortunately, he didn’t take too long. Before she could lose the elation singing through her, he clasped her to him and returned her kiss as if his answer came all the way up from the bottom of his soul.
The fabric of his sleeping trousers was so thin that she couldn’t mistake the way he felt about her, in spite of her inexperience. She kissed him for a long time while his arms strained around her. Then she eased back from his embrace and began to unbutton her shirt.
His eyes darkened, as if they were on fire with shadows. A bit awkwardly, she kicked off her boots. When she slipped the shirt from her shoulders and dropped her skirt, he caught his breath. Even the hair on his head seemed to burn with desire.
Abruptly, he jerked down his pants and took her to his bed.
He was almost devout in the way he kissed and touched her; torn between wonder and alarm, as if he wanted her so much that he didn’t trust himself. As a result, he was tentative when she most wished him to be sure. Master Eremis was right. During the Master’s brief stay in the dungeon after the summoning of the Congery’s champion, he had said to her, Whenever you think of another man, you will remember my lips upon your breasts. That was true: Geraden’s touch reminded her of the Imager – of his assurance, his willingness to take possession of her completely.
And yet Geraden conveyed an intensity that moved her deeply. She felt that she had spent most of her life waiting for this time in bed with him. She could do without assurance. They would learn what they needed to know together.
But it went wrong, the way everything went wrong for him. He had discovered his talent for Imagery too late, when he was no longer able to do anything with it. Now he discovered her love for him too late, he held her in his arms too late: he had lost the ability to do anything with her. Maybe his own inexperience made him too anxious. Maybe he couldn’t stop worrying about Houseldon and his family. She wasn’t sure what the reason was – and in a sense she didn’t care. She cared only that he swore under his breath and rolled away from her, lay on his back with his fists clenched at his sides and his muscles knotted, trying to withdraw into iron.
She watched him lock himself away from her, and her joy began to crumble. For a moment, she thought about weeping.
Then she got an idea.
With the tip of one finger, she stroked the hard line of his jaw. ‘Guess what,’ she said as if they were engaged in a casual and even bantering conversation. ‘I’ve just thought of a reason to believe I’m really real.’
‘I already believe it,’ he muttered from the opposite side of the world. ‘You know that.’
‘But you don’t know why,’ she returned playfully. ‘That’s the trouble with you. You don’t have enough reasons. You just have your “strongest feelings” – you do everything on faith.
‘I’ll give you a reason.
‘People like Eremis say I was created by Imagery. I came out of you and your talent when you made that mirror. But if that’s true, don’t you think you would have created a woman you could have an easier time making love with?’
She took him so entirely by surprise that he couldn’t stop himself. As unexpectedly as a shout, he burst out laughing.
And once he started to laugh he lost control.
‘That’s perfect,’ he gasped between gales of mirth. ‘I’m so confused I can’t figure out my own talent. I can’t help my family. Or my King. Or the woman I love. But that’s not enough for me. I’m not satisfied with just that.’
Briefly, she heard a note of hysteria in his laughter, and she nearly panicked. But the simple act of laughing seemed to clean the sorrow and self-pity out of him; the more he laughed, the more he relaxed.
‘No, I’m so confused that when I create a woman to love I make her so perverse she accidentally betrays my whole life. Then she wants to bed me when I’m so scared I can hardly think.
‘I don’t need enemies. As soon as I stop laughing, I’m going to kill myself.
‘Oh, Terisa.’
He said her name as if it made him ache. Rolling back to her, he put his hands on the sides of her face to hold her and began kissing her again.
Unquestionably, his kisses lacked Master Eremis’ assured passion. But they were sweet and compelling, like the remembered call of horns. And when she remembered horns, the music came back into her.
This time, it went right.
It went right nearly until dawn. When she finally slept, she still clung to him like a promise that she was never going to let him go.
At dawn, the house stirred around them; but she and Geraden continued sleeping.
Fortunately, Houseldon wasn’t relying on Terisa and Geraden for vigilance. When the attack came, the men on watch spotted it immediately and raised the alarm.
Shouts echoed like wails among the houses and taverns, the livery stables and granaries. As fast as they could get out of bed, men spilled from their homes, clutching pitchforks and scythes, axes, shepherd’s crooks sharpened to resemble pikes, sledgehammers, knives and bucksaws, ordinary clubs, an occasional sword, and more than a few hunting bows. The Domne’s six trained bowmen took their command positions around the stockade almost instantly. Shouting for his canes, the Domne himself thrashed out of his twisted bedclothes.
Tholden was ahead of his father. The truth was that he had been too worried for sleep. After trying uselessly to rest until after midnight, he had gotten up, put on his clothes. If Quiss hadn’t restrained him, he would have gone to wear himself out pacing around the stockade to no purpose. But she had compelled him – almost by force – to sit down and drink a flagon of wine; she had kneaded the knots in his neck and shoulders and back until her hands ached; she had made love to him. After that, he pretended to sleep until she let down her guard. Then he got out of bed again.
He was in the front room stirring up the fire when he heard the alarm. Roaring in a voice that wasn’t made to convey anger or violence, he left the house. For a second, he wheeled, trying to find which direction the alarm came from. Then he set off at a run, his beard lifting in the dawn breeze.
Terisa groped awake, roused more by the way Geraden exploded out of bed than by the shouts. He seemed to jump unerringly into his clothes while she fumbled to follow him, catch up with him; he flung the door open before she had begun to button her shirt.
Nevertheless she did catch up with him. Out in the hall, he collided with Stead and had to stop to lift his injured brother off the floor. Stead clung to him for a moment. ‘Get me a knife,’ he panted. ‘I can’t run anywhere. But I can fight here if I have to.’
‘I’ll tell Quiss,’ Geraden replied as he pulled away.
With Terisa beside him now, he reached the front room, shouted Stead’s message to Quiss, then dashed out of the house.
‘Where?’ he demanded of the first man he met.
The man looked too frightened to have any idea what he was doing ‘West.’
‘West,’ Geraden muttered, thinking hard. ‘So it isn’t soldiers. Soldiers would come from the north. The northeast.’
Terisa saw what he was getting at; but her heart was pounding in her throat, and she couldn’t speak.
‘Eremis is sending Imagery against us.’
She nodded. They ran west among the buildings.
Everyone was running west. Tholden’s instructions to Houseldon had been explicit: women and children, stay at home; anyone who was too young or too frail or too sick to fight, stay at home. Unfortunately, the peo
ple of Domne had lost the habit of taking orders. The streets were crowded with people who shouldn’t have been there. Some of the men who were prepared or equipped or at least determined to fight had difficulty working their way through the throng.
But Tholden had replied to the alarm so quickly that he was ahead of the crowds; he didn’t know he was being imperfectly obeyed. He reached the guardpost and climbed onto the platform where the man who had raised the alarm was on watch in time to see the whole attack clearly.
They came in without a sound except for the rush of their paws and the harsh murmur of their breathing: strange wolves with spines bristling down their curved backs, a double row of fangs in each slavering jaw, and something like intelligence in their wild eyes. Only a few dozen of them, Tholden thought when he first spotted them. Enough to ravage a herd of sheep. Or terrorize a farmstead. Not enough to threaten Houseldon. They won’t be able to get past the stockade.
Then the leader of the pack sprang at the wall.
The wolf seemed to come straight up at him. Leaping at least eight feet in the air, it got its forelegs over the wall. While its hind legs scrambled for a purchase on the wood, its jaws stretched toward his face.
For an instant more horrible than anything he had imagined, Tholden couldn’t move. He was a farmer, not a soldier: he didn’t know anything about fighting. Deep down in his heart, he had always believed there was something secretly crazy about people like Artagel, who went into battle with such fierce joy. The men standing on the platform with him had already flinched away. One of the bowmen rushed to bring up his bow. But Tholden just couldn’t move.
Then hot slaver splashed into his face as the fangs drew near, and something inside him shifted. Although he never thought about it, he was prodigiously strong, and his strength came to his rescue. He reached out, caught the wolf by the throat, and heaved it backward.
It fell among the pack, breaking the charge, preventing the wolves behind it from gathering themselves to spring. The pack burst into snarls – a raw, red sound, avid for blood. Jaws snapped. Then the wolves swirled around to regain their momentum so that they could leap.
‘Bowmen!’ the Domne’s son cried desperately, ‘get some arrows into those things! If they get over the wall—!’
Not fast enough. Already three wolves were leaping, four, six. And instead of attacking the guardpost directly, they hurled themselves at a part of the wall where there were no immediate defenders.
He was appalled by the realization that these beasts knew what they were doing. They were at their most vulnerable while they tried to cross the top of the wall – so they moved out of reach.
But an arrow thudded into the chest of the nearest wolf. It fell away, coughing blood. While the bowman snatched up another shaft, someone below the platform threw a hatchet that buried itself between a pair of glaring, wild eyes. Someone else tried to use a pitchfork as if it were a javelin; the tines missed, but the wolf was forced to drop back.
Three down.
The other three got over the wall.
Tholden saw a farmer swing an axe and miss – saw him go down with his throat torn out by an effortless toss of the wolf’s head. Luckily, the next man struck a solid blow with a club, and the wolf wobbled. While the beast was still unsteady on its legs, one long sweep of a scythe disemboweled it.
Defenders arrived as quickly as the narrow streets and the crowds permitted. The second wolf over the wall ducked between two hostlers – who nearly brained each other trying to hit it – ripped open the best baker in Houseldon before he could raise his hands, then flung itself at a knot of young boys who had escaped from their mothers. But it went down when an ancient sword in the hands of an old man who remembered the wars struck between the spines protecting its back.
The third wolf took an arrow in its hindquarters from a terrified young apprentice bowman. As if it thrived on pain, it killed the young man, bit off another man’s hand at the wrist when the man tried to stab the creature with a knife, then raced down an alley toward the heart of Houseldon.
At the same time, more wolves sprang to the attack.
Only a few dozen of them, Tholden thought. He wanted to tear his hair.
A second bowman ran up from the guardpost where he had been stationed. Like his comrade, he began picking wolves off the top of the wall as fast as he could nock arrows to the string. But they were only two. Every time one of them reached for a new shaft, three or four beasts got into Houseldon.
Calling frantically for help, Tholden leaped off the platform.
The other bowmen were on their way, but hampered by the crowds. And the defenders at the scene of attack didn’t know how to fight an enemy like this; they got in each other’s way. In a sense, the wolves were losing. They would all be killed eventually. But if enough of them ran loose in the streets, they would do terrible carnage before they were hunted down.
And if they killed the bowmen—
Maybe the wolves wouldn’t lose.
Tholden snatched an axe from a man who obviously didn’t know how to use it effectively. Planting himself in the path of the wolves, he hewed at them as if they were nothing more than a stand of timber. He had no idea what else to do.
So he didn’t see what happened to the beasts that got past him. He didn’t see the arrival of the remaining bowmen, or the efforts they made to thin out the attack; he didn’t see the wall of defenders behind him crumble and fail as people panicked and fled and even men who knew how to wield their weapons went down.
On the other hand, he was one of the few people in a position to see that the wolves were only the vanguard of the attack.
No one else guessed that. No one else thought about it. The wolves were trouble enough. Cursing the folly which had taken them outside, women rushed back to their homes, hauling their children along behind them. Men dove into hiding. Flocks of chickens fled in a squall of feathers and fright, running crazily in all directions or battering their way heavily up to the rooftops. The whole west side of Houseldon was in disarray, instructions and defenses forgotten.
Suddenly, the street in front of Terisa and Geraden cleared, and they found themselves facing a beast with blood on its jaws and an arrow sticking out of its hindquarters.
The spines along its back made it look like a hedgehog of monstrous size. The double row of its fangs made it look like a great shark.
Terisa was reminded of riders with red fur and too many arms.
The wolf stopped, scented the air. Its eyes seemed to burn with the possibility of intelligence.
‘It’s hunting us,’ she said. At any rate, she thought she said that; she couldn’t tell whether she spoke aloud.
‘When I push you,’ Geraden whispered, ‘go for that house.’ He nudged her slightly toward the nearest building. ‘Get inside. Close the door. Try to bolt it.’
The wolf began to snarl deep in his chest – a sound like a distant rumble of thunder.
‘What’re you going to do?’
She must have spoken aloud. Otherwise he wouldn’t have answered.
‘Same thing in the opposite direction.’
Automatically, she nodded, too frightened to do anything else.
As if her nod were a signal, the wolf sprang at them, slavering murderously.
Geraden hit her shoulder so hard that she stumbled and fell.
At least she fell out of the way of the beast’s charge. Trying frantically to bounce up from the ground, she jammed her legs under her, pounded up onto the porch of the house—
—whirled to see what was happening to Geraden.
He hadn’t made any attempt to do what she was doing. After pushing her aside, he had simply ducked. By the time the wolf checked its spring, landed, and came back at him, he was on his feet facing the creature, poised as if he intended to kick its brains out.
‘Geraden!’
‘Get in the house! ’
So fast that she hardly saw it happen, he jumped sideways. The wolf flashed past him. She hea
rd the savage click as jaws strong enough to crush bone tried to close on him. The sleeve of his jerkin burst into tatters.
But there was no blood. Yet.
Faster this time because its second charge had been less headlong, the wolf turned and went for him again.
If he had tripped, if he had missed his footing or misjudged the assault, he would have died. No one could do what he was doing, not for long. The arrow in the wolf’s hindquarters wasn’t enough of a handicap. Nevertheless he dodged a third time – ripped himself out of the way, ducked and rolled, came to his feet to face the wolf again just before it sprang.
Blindly, stupidly, Terisa started back into the street to help him.
At that instant, a woman came out of the house in mortal terror. So scared that she could hardly control her limbs, she thrust a pitchfork into Terisa’s hands. Then she slammed the door behind her, slammed a bar into place against the door.
Terisa took the pitchfork without thinking. Wailing like a madwoman to distract the wolf, she leaped off the porch and did her utter best to spear the beast on the tines.
She missed. The wolf was too fast, too smart for her inexpert onslaught. When it came around at her, however, she was able to fend it off, almost by accident; it shied away from impaling itself on the pitchfork.
As if out of nowhere, the head of a cane whizzed through the air and cracked the wolf across the base of its skull.
Coughing a howl, the beast spun and hurled itself on the Domne.
Geraden yelped a helpless warning. Terisa froze, holding her weapon as if she had forgotten its existence.
The Domne couldn’t run or dodge. With his bad leg, he could scarcely hobble. But he had a cane in his other hand as well, and when the beast leaped at him he rammed the end of that stick down its throat.
At the same time, Geraden went past Terisa, tearing the pitchfork from her hands in one motion and hammering it into the wolfs back with all his strength.