The Black Raven

  “I’d really like to draw some sort of picture of the dun,” Bellyra remarked one morning. “A map, I suppose I mean. I don’t have the slightest idea of how to go about it.”

  “No more would I, Your Highness,” Maddyn said. “But Otho might. He seems to know a fair lot of odd lore.”

  “That’s true, and it’s a good idea.”

  They had left the main ward behind by then and gone round to the back of the broch complex to one of the odd little spaces marked off by the walls and rubble of buildings long gone. Pale sunlight fell on the dark stones with no power to warm them and cast black shadows onto the muddy ground. As usual the pages had run on ahead, this time to climb up a pile of old cobblestones that looked dangerously unstable.

  “Shall I go fetch them, Your Highness?” Maddyn said.

  “In a moment. They won’t kill themselves straightaway, or so we can hope. I’ve got a thing I want to give you.”

  Bellyra took a small twist of cloth out of her kirtle and handed it to him. When he opened it, he found a silver ring, a flat band engraved with roses. He turned it between thumb and forefinger to admire the blooms, so tiny yet so perfectly drawn that it seemed he should be able to smell their scent.

  “Well, see if it fits you,” Bellyra said impatiently.

  “It’s a lovely thing,” Maddyn said, “but truly, do you think I should take a gift from you?”

  “Of course! Why would I have Otho make it if I didn’t want you to have it?”

  “I’m worrying what others might think. Gossips, I mean.”

  “I’ve given lots of other people little trinkets over the years.” She was smiling at him. “And in fact, I asked Maryn if I should reward you for being so patient. He said indeed I should. So just don’t go bragging about it, and no one will think twice.”

  Maddyn laughed and slipped the ring over the middle finger of his right hand. He had to squeeze it over his knuckle, but it fit snugly but comfortably once he had it seated.

  “Otho’s got a good eye,” Bellyra said. “I thought he’d have to take it back and size it, but it’s meant to be yours, sure enough.”

  “You have my humble thanks, my lady. It’s a splendid thing, and I’m honored that you’d think of me.”

  “Are you really?”

  “I am. A gift from you is worth half the earth to me.”

  Bellyra smiled in a way he particularly liked, glancing away as if she were a young lass and still shy. He would have given the other half of the earth to kiss that smile, but always he was aware of the dun looming over them, with a hundred windows like a hundred eyes.

  “We’d best go in,” Bellyra said. “I’m supposed to be teaching Riddmar about Cerrmor, as if the poor child will be able to remember all the things I’ve told him! And we’d better not let those pages break their necks.”

  After he escorted the princess back to the women’s hall, Maddyn decided to go back to the barracks before he joined the other men for the noon meal. He crossed the ward, thinking of very little, but at the stairs leading to his quarters he paused. Had someone called his name? All at once he knew he was being watched. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rising and spun around, his hand on his sword hilt. Lady Merodda was standing about ten feet away, her hands decorously folded at her waist, and studying him with unblinking eyes. In the sunlight her yellow hair gleamed as if it had been oiled.

  “That ring,” she whispered. “It binds my heart. It chokes me.”

  Without thinking he raised his hand.

  “It bodes evil to me,” Merodda went on. “But a worse evil to you, silver dagger.” She tossed back her head and laughed. “But a far far worse evil to you.”

  The laughter died in mid-peal. She had vanished.

  Maddyn felt himself tremble, and cold sweat sheeted down his back. He sat down on the stairs rather than risk climbing them, and tried to think. Was he ill? Had he imagined the whole thing? If the apparition actually had been a ghost, had she spoken true about his ring? He looked down at his hand and the silver roses. How could he give up the token his lady had given him, when it would cause her hurt to see him without it? He would do anything to spare her pain, even if it should mean his death.

  Nevyn happened to notice the rose ring a few nights later, when Maddyn came to his tower room with a note from the princess. As he handed it over, the silver gleamed in the candlelight.

  “That’s a pretty thing,” Nevyn said. “Where did you get that?”

  “Our lady gave it to me,” Maddyn said. “The prince suggested she reward my patience, not that it needed rewarding.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Nevyn looked up and found Maddyn troubled. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

  “Well, someone else noticed it, too,” Maddyn said. “Lady Merodda’s ghost.”

  “What?”

  “It was a blasted strange thing, my lord. She appeared in broad daylight and told me the ring would cause her harm, but it was a greater evil to me. I was fair troubled by it.”

  “No doubt! Here, let me see it for a moment.”

  Maddyn slipped the ring off and handed it over. Nevyn clasped it in his palm and stared off across the room. He could feel the ring emanating—something.

  “It’s odd,” Nevyn said. “There’s dweomer on this ring, sure enough, but I’d not call it evil, exactly. All dweomer is dangerous if you don’t understand it, and that’s the sort of danger I feel.”

  When Nevyn gave the ring back, Maddyn put it on without a heartbeat’s hesitation. He’s accepted the dweomer, then, Nevyn thought. With the thought came the dweomer cold, racing down his spine, and grim knowledge. Within its silver circle the ring bound many a Wyrd within it: himself, Bellyra, Maryn, and Lilli as well, but no one would know the truth and the working of it for many years hence. At the center of the circle of Wyrd, however, would stand Maddyn, down the long years and in the lives ahead of them all.

  EPILOGUE

  SPRING 1118

  When a man wishes to study sorcery, the art drives him a hard bargain, to wit, that it will trade its secrets only for sacrifice and lonely toil. Should he try to clutch at common human happiness, he will find that he might as well pour wine into his hands. The sorcerer’s art will allow him to drink no more of life’s wine than the few drops he can lick from his fingers.

  —The Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll

  Without any effort on Evandar’s part, spring came to his country. Formerly, a hundred years and more could pass in the lands of men and elves while a single afternoon crept by in his. Now spring burst upon him while he mourned his people, so quickly that he knew it must have fallen upon the physical world as well. He stood on the hilltop and watched, dazed, as the snow melted into rivulets that poured into the river below. Spring, however, came only where it wanted to come. He picked his way downhill across brown mud, flecked here and there with dead stone. Once the river had run silver, but now it oozed, a dark grey like lead. The water reeds along its banks stood dead and brown.

  For a moment Evandar stared into the river, which in the past had shown him many a vision. He saw nothing. He turned away and set off upstream, walking slowly, listening for voices in the wind—none. As he walked, the dead terrain around him changed. First he spotted a few blades of grass, then some small saplings, more grass, and then trees until he found himself far from the river in a meadow of spring grass, dotted with white flowers. Still, even in the midst of this burgeoning life, he heard no voices, and he saw no visions.

  For the seeming-space of an afternoon, Evandar walked his lands to see how they’d changed. All the images of cities had vanished, and the rose gardens, the arbors, the cloth-of-gold pavilions where his people had once feasted had disappeared with them. Much to his surprise the green hills remained, dusted with yellow buttercups and little daisies now instead of roses. Tall trees stood unpruned; straggly saplings grew amid tangles of weeds and shrubs. Now and then a flock of birds flew overhead, and he could hear bees among the clover. Once, when he p
assed a tangle of hazel withes near a stream, he saw a little pointed face and two bright eyes. He took a step closer, but with a noiseless slide into the stream, the water rat swam away. Above in the tangled thicket, a red squirrel chattered at him.

  Where did they come from? he wondered. I never created any such. He found himself remembering other bestial faces, these snarling and dark, in the strange country just beyond his lands, where the old man sat endlessly peeling his apple and bringing life down from wherever it was that life sprang. The old man had redeemed those creatures, perhaps, and sent them off to live in the green fields.

  “The wild things will endure,” Evandar said aloud. “That soothes my heart.”

  Perhaps the land had lost its voice simply because it had returned to the wild. Yet as he walked in the eerie silence another reason suggested itself to him. Perhaps he had no future for the omens to reveal. Perhaps it was time for him to die, whatever “die” might mean to such as him. He found himself thinking of Jill, who had spent her life like a coin to ransom Cengarn from Alshandra. Must he do the same to stop his brother’s meddling?

  “I’d best make some other provision for Salamander, then, if that’s true.”

  On a sunny hilltop Evandar stood waiting. No voice spoke, no answer came to him from the future or from the green hills.

  “Fade away and die!” He shouted it out. “Is that what will happen to me? Fade away and die?”

  Not even an echo floated back on the wind. Finally with a shrug he turned away. So this, then, was what fear felt like, a bitterness in the mouth, an empty coldness at the heart.

  In winter, dragons tend to their dreams. Even on short summer nights dragons are great dreamers; when they wake they consider their dreams well, then lay them up in memory for the cold time. Once winter comes they can brood them properly as they drowse deep within their fire mountain lairs. The old dreams hatch new ones, long elaborate visions and tales that often take several nights to complete.

  All that winter Arzosah found the man she called Rori Dragonfriend woven into her dreams. At times she would relive the moment when he’d held up the rose ring and enslaved her with name-dweomer. From those dreams she woke shivering and hissing in fear. She would leap to her feet and stretch out her wings for flight until she remembered that she was awake and safe in her beloved home. She would lie back down on the stone ledge, and from her perch, high up in an enormous cavern, she would contemplate the steam rising from the hot springs far below until at last she felt soothed, ready to sleep and dream again.

  At other times she would dream of the battles of the summer past: the stench of blood like perfume and Rori’s berserk laughter ringing over the slaughter. From those she woke smug, yawning and stretching her claws at the memory of dead horses. The remembered taste of those feasts would drive her out of her lair if the day were clear. She would soar over the snow, seeking out the valleys where she could find deer. In the deep snow they floundered, easy prey. Once she’d gorged herself, she’d return to her home mountain and the warmth of its gutted interior.

  Slowly the year turned toward spring. When Arzosah flew she felt warmer air and saw the snow growing thin. Eventually the rains came, and the world turned to brown mud. On a day when the trees were putting out buds, Arzosah returned from one of these hunts to find an unwelcome guest. She entered her home cavern through a fissure high up on the side of a cliff, and as soon as she started crawling down the tunnel inside, she smelled dweomer. To her all things magical smelled like the air immediately after a strike of lightning—sharp and clean, tingling with power—a scent so strong that it could mask the accustomed stink of brimstone and old burning within the cavern. She backed out of the tunnel, clung precariously to the little ledge below the fissure, and considered what to do. The dweomer smell attracted her, but she remembered how she’d been mastered by dweomer in this very cavern.

  “Once of that is enough,” Arzosah muttered—in Elvish. With a possible enemy so near, she refused to speak in Dragonish, a tongue the great wyrms keep to themselves.

  She let go of the ledge and spread her wings with a slap of the air that boomed like a drum, but rather than fly away, she glided down to the valley below to perch on an outcrop of grey granite. Arzosah folded her wings, sat back on her haunches, and contemplated the mouth of the fissure, far above her.

  “A clumsy trick like that isn’t going to fool me.” His voice came first; then Evandar materialized in front of her. “I heard you fly away.”

  Hissing like a thousand cats, the dragon leapt to her feet. Evandar laughed and stepped back, raising one hand as if to ask for peace. He had taken the form of an elf, dressed in a green tunic and tight deerskin trousers, but to her dragonish sight his body wavered and glowed. He smelled so strongly of dweomer that she longed to eat him. Unfortunately, he only looked like meat, she knew, rather than being made of it.

  “So!” Arzosah snarled. “I thought I smelled trouble, and trouble you are.”

  “None other,” Evandar said, grinning. “Arzosah Sothy Lorohaz, remember that I bound you by the power of your true name! I control and command you.”

  “I keep trying to forget, but I can’t, so there we are, you nasty bit of etheric slime! What do you want with me now?”

  “A number of things. First of all, spring is here.”

  “So it is; not that it’s any of your doing.”

  “You made Rhodry Maelwaedd a promise, that you’d return to him in the spring. Do you intend to keep it?”

  “What’s it to you if I do or not?”

  “Ah, you don’t, then. I thought not. You wyrms are faithless, aren’t you? A promise is naught to you. Nasty and faithless both.”

  Arzosah growled at him, but Evandar laughed, waggling a finger at her like a schoolmaster.

  “I caught you out there, didn’t I?” Evandar said.

  “You did not! I never told you if I meant to go or not.”

  “If you’d planned to keep that promise, you wouldn’t have been so coy.”

  “Coy?” Arzosah hissed again. “How dare you call me coy? If you didn’t have name-dweomer, I’d kill you.”

  “But I do have it. The second thing I want is an errand. Rhodry Maelwaedd’s brother lives in far-off Bardek, and he’s gone mad. I promised I’d bring him home, but I find that I’ve got too many other important matters to attend to.”

  “Hold your tongue! Do you expect me to fly across the Southern Sea and fetch him back?”

  “I don’t merely expect you to. I intend to demand it and bind you with your name to ensure you do it.”

  “But I can’t. The ocean’s far too wide, days and days of flying. I can’t fly forever without food and sleep. And how would I carry him home? In my claws? And what would he eat and drink, anyway?”

  “Ah.” Evandar hesitated briefly. “I hate to admit this, but you’re right. It wasn’t much of a plan, was it?”

  “Why not send a ship for him? That’s what ships are for, carrying things back and forth over the water. Dragons aren’t.”

  Evandar nodded, staring down at the ground with narrow eyes, as if he were thinking things through. Arzosah sat back down and considered just how much she hated him. He’d tricked her into revealing her name, he’d given the rose ring to Rhodry to enslave her, and now apparently he thought of her as some sort of servant, to run and fetch at his bidding.

  “The third thing,” Evandar said at last. “I have need of a vision, wyrm. It’s one thing to say I’ll return Salamander to Deverry. Where exactly in Deverry is another thing entirely. My heart is too troubled for me to see clearly.”

  “Are you saying you want me to scry for you?”

  “Exactly that.”

  “No.”

  “You can’t say no. I have your name.”

  Arzosah tipped back her head and roared her rage to the sky.

  “Whine all you want,” Evandar said. “But you’ll do as I say.”

  “Whine? Whine, is it?” Words failed her, and she snarled,
tossing her head back and forth.

  “The sooner you scry for me,” Evandar said, “the sooner I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Oh very well, scry I will, but I’ve never met Rhodry’s brother, so how can I scry him out?”

  “It’s the future I want to see. I know where he is now.”

  “There’s something else you need to know. You’re a wretched nuisance. Come into my lair.”

  Evandar vanished. Arzosah flew to the cliffside, scrabbled her way into the fissure, and paused to breathe deeply. The dweomer smell lay over everything, hot and exciting. She crawled down the tunnel and, when she emerged onto her sleeping ledge, she found Evandar there before her, sitting on the rock and staring down into the cavern. Far below them steam roiled and curled from the hot springs deep within the fire mountain’s heart.

  “How will you scry?” Evandar said.

  “Into the mists.” Arzosah lay down on the ledge and tucked her front paws under her chest. “That’s the dragonish way. Tell me of this brother and his madness.”

  While Evandar talked, Arzosah stared into the steaming mist below her. Shapes formed, mere illusions of the sort that anyone can see in clouds, then drifted into nothingness. In her mind she began to picture this Ebañy, began to see his wife as well and the children, playing among the tents of their travelling show. She saw in her mind Bardek, green with spring, and the white cities on their seacliffs. In the mists other images began to appear, fragments only and short-lived, until at last the scrying took her over.

  “I see the ocean,” Arzosah began. “The ocean pounding on great rocks beneath a high slender tower. Night is falling. I see the tower again, and lo! a fire is burning at the top of the tower. Down below lies a dun, and beyond that, a little town.”

  “Cannobaen!” Evandar whispered. “Go on.”

  “Strange ships are sailing into the harbor, ships with prows carved into the shape of dragons. On the deck stands a blond man with a child in his arms, a wild child with brown hair that’s all matted and curly.”