Aching and weary already from long hours of husbanding power, she forced her sorrow aside. No good could be gained from brooding. Tough as the fisherfolk who had bred and raised her, the young woman mustered her Dreamweaver's awareness once more. Shortly the call she shaped sped southeast, to the straits and the isle of Cliffhaven.
The subject of Taen's search was never a hard man to locate even when obscured by a crowd. The incisive force of his thoughts struck easily through the interference patterns cast by others in his presence. By nature, the Lord of Pirates was quick to sense change, and even swifter to act. From the instant the Dreamweaver made contact, the Kielmark disregarded the presence of the two captains he had summoned into conference in his chart room. Arrested in mid-sentence, he fell silent, the maps and the pins he had been using to discuss strategy abandoned under his huge, square-fingered hands. In less than the space of a heartbeat, he slammed back his chair.
His captains knew better than to interrupt when his moods came suddenly upon him. They sat, carefully motionless, as their master arose and tossed a cloak of maroon wool over his muscled frame. Then, without a word or a look back, the Kielmark kicked open the postern and stepped out into the sea breeze that whipped across the battlements overlooking the harbour.
Taen locked her dream-sense in and framed him there, brawny and wolf-quick on his feet, his dark, curled hair crushed flat by wind and his great fists clenched at his sides. Deftly as the Dreamweaver engaged his attention, he started like a wild animal.
'Taen?' The sovereign Lord of Cliffhaven glanced over his shoulder, at a fortress that remained deserted under grey clouds and ice. No child wearing a woman's form walked the battlements to meet him, with eyes that saw far too much, and clothes that seemed always overlarge for her slim frame. The Kielmark shed his wariness with forced deliberation. Certain now that the call had come from within, he waited with cutting impatience for the Dreamweaver's message to resume.
'Trouble has arrived, and far sooner than expected,' Taen sent. The clang of goat bells on the tor faded into distance as she centred her focus upon the ruler of Cliffhaven.
The Kielmark sprang tense. 'What trouble?' Even as he spoke, Taen sensed his reflexive review of men, warships, and the current offensive capability of his island fortress.
'Maelgrim has begun to try his powers.' The Dreamweaver clarified with images gathered that morning from the northern borders of Hallowild, knowing as she spun memory into dream-form that the impact would inflame the Kielmark's caustic restlessness to action.
The Lord of Cliffhaven recoiled slightly as her dream-link embraced his mind. Strong fingers bit down on the crenellation as his view of the ocean wavered, overlaid by the crude planks of a farmsteader's cottage. Sheep grazed in the dooryard. Hedges of matted thorn enclosed a snow-bound patch of garden, but there all semblance of normality ended. Blood pooled around the base of the stump the steader used to split firewood. Sodden bundles of cloth lay sprawled to one side, and with a sickened lurch of his gut, the Kielmark saw that the lumps beneath the rags had once been human. Something had driven an honest man to dismember his wife and children with an axe, and leave the corpses steaming on the ice for scavengers to pick.
The Kielmark's hackles rose. 'Kordane's Fires, why?' The alarm underlying his tension struck with the force of a whiplash.
Taen instinctively tightened her protective screens. 'Dreams, dark dreams spun by Maelgrim.' She qualified with a memory gleaned from a tinker she had found mumbling and crazed in the gloom of the steader's root cellar.
Taen shaped no more than a fragment. Yet that one glimpse was enough to make a man shudder like an insect pinned on a needle. The Kielmark started back in horror. His skin rose into gooseflesh while his awareness danced to measures of insanity. Even thirdhand, the creeping, poisonous web Maelgrim cast over his victims' minds made the spirit curdle in despair.
Taen banished the nightmare. The Kielmark stood granite-still against the bite of the wind, his blue eyes unfocused and his thoughts turned morbidly inward; she stung him alert with facts. 'When the tinker came out and saw the corpses, he ran to the barn and slashed his wrists with a scythe.' She paused, waiting, while the sovereign on the battlements of a fortress many leagues distant steadied his shaken nerves. 'Lord, I showed you only a fraction of the force Maelgrim has brought to bear. This evil cannot be battled from a distance. I must go to Hallowild, and quickly.'
The Kielmark looked up. The reflexive, splintering transition into fury that so often intimidated his captains drove him to swift decision. 'You'll have ships. I'll place Deison Corley in command. But you'll wait to leave until he gives you escort, am I clear?'
Taen protested. 'Folk will die while I delay!'
The Kielmark's anger went cold. 'Show me the steader who can replace your talents, girl. Wait. Corley will sail with the tide. I promise you, no captain in Keithland can wring more speed from the wind than he.'
The precaution was sensible; Keithland's defences were spread perilously thin already, with the Stormwarden still trapped within the ice. Taen conceded the Kielmark's point; she would await the arrival of Deison Corley's fleet, though the constraint of delay was a bitter one.
The Dreamweaver released contact, and sensed, through the dissolution of the link, the Kielmark's great shout that brought a familiar chestnut-haired captain bounding from the warmth of the chart room. He received his master's orders, while on another isle to the north a vista of fog-bound tors swam slowly back into focus around the Dreamweaver.
After the Kielmark's explosive vitality, the chime of the goat bells seemed strangely thin and unreal. Taen sneezed at the drop of water she found trembling on the tip of her nose. Moisture seeped through her clothing; during her interval in trance, the sky had begun to spit sleet. Yet even the hostilities of the weather could not make her return to shelter in the village beside the shore.
Instead she gathered herself yet again and bent her Dreamweaver's perception southwestward. Tamlin of the Vaere must be informed of the ill tidings from Felwaithe.
Taen was unsurprised when her first attempt showed nothing but a view of white-capped sea. The fabled isle was difficult to locate, even on days when she was not depleted with exhaustion and cold. Tamlin named himself master of riddles. His powers extended across both space and time, and, seemingly at whim, he caused his isle to undergo slight shifts in location. Only when he made contact with those rare few he chose to train was he found inhabiting the present.
Taen adjusted the energy at her command and successfully completed the transition into the shadowy, altered dream-image that reflected the past. Now she perceived an islet, a crescent spit of land hammered by breakers. The shoreline was jagged and storm-whipped, jumbled with stunted trees all twisted by gales and tide. Taen laced her powers into the physical presence of the land, then shaped an image wrought of dream over all. Tumbled sands and jagged rocks became a beach of smooth and creamy white. Grasses softened the dunes. Scrub trees filled out into a forest of stately cedars, tall, green, and unbent by wind. Taen wrought change until the untidy spit of land stood transformed, a place of bewitched perfection set like a jewel on the face of the sea; for by shifting that same isle beyond reach of ocean storms and out of phase with the seasons for longer than the memory of men, the Vaere had made it so.
Taen settled her dream-sense, until soil and rock and shoreline lay in balance with her image of Tamlin's isle. Then, with delicate care, she moved her awareness futureward until land and dream-vision converged into solid reality. The spicy scent of cedars filled her nostrils. She knew sunlight as gentle as spring, and soft breezes sighing through dune grass where sand swallows dipped and cried. Yet although Taen knew she had located the true Isle of the Vaere, at once she sensed something vital amiss. Precisely what was lacking eluded her, until she sought the grove within the forest where dwelt the network of energies that comprised the presence of Tamlin. No resonance of power met her dream-sense. She encountered only dark, and space, and the soun
dless emptiness of void. The enchanted grove had vanished from the face of Keithland as thoroughly as if it had never existed.
Though dismayed, Taen Dreamweaver did not give way to alarm. The mysteries of the Vaere were riddles within riddles, and knowledge beyond the pale of mortal men. Though no little man in feathers and bells materialized to tell her, Taen placed only one interpretation upon the emptiness she found at the isle's centre. Ivainson Jaric had begun his last trial of mastery, the Cycle of Fire itself. Tamlin of the Vaere had withdrawn to oversee his ordeal and, through the time of passage, could not be recalled by any means a mortal might command. There was no remedy for the fact that the timing could not be worse, that the guardian of mankind had withdrawn beyond reach when his guidance was needed most sorely.
Troubled, Taen released the bindings of her call. The enchanted isle faded from her dream-sense, restoring her awareness to cutting cold and the strident cries of curlews. The Dreamweaver of Imrill Kand dispelled the last of her trance and stared out over the harbour beyond the tor. With the fishing fleet out plying their nets, the waters spread grey, empty except for one derelict dory left at anchor, and the mastless hulk of a sloop. As near as a fortnight hence, the bay would echo with the crack of spars and canvas; black brigantines manned by battle-trained crews would shear around the headland, the Kielmark's red wolf banner flying from masthead and halyard. Aching with worry for Jaric, and impatient to be away, Taen could do nothing but count the minutes until she could board and sail to Felwaithe. For with Jaric irrevocably committed to the Cycle of Fire, and the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer imprisoned in ice until a firelord's mastery could free him, Taen alone remained to resist Maelgrim Dark-dreamer and the forefront of the demon assault.
* * *
Warmth came unseasonably late to the latitudes of Keithland, and the ocean tossed, coldly veiled in spindrift. Corley and the Moonless's five companion vessels sailed briskly, sped by the storms that habitually raked the Corine Sea before equinox. Ice still scabbed the tors by the time the small fleet hove into view off Imrill Kand.
A young cousin ran from the fishers' wharf to the cottage off Rat's Alley with the news. He found the Dreamweaver taking leave of her mother, her meagre store of clothing already bundled and waiting by the door. Taen had followed the Kielmark's brigantines by sorcery, and the time of their arrival was known to her long before the masts breasted the horizon. Though the enchantress spoke her thanks, and Marl's widow offered warm bread in return for his favour, the boy refused hospitality and left. Just before the door swung closed, Taen saw him raise crossed wrists in the timeworn sign against evils brought on by enchantment.
She turned a wry grin toward her mother. 'Well, you won't be sorry to see an end to that nonsense. Do you suppose the wool seller's niece will stop sending you skeins with knots to tangle my spells?'
Marl's widow grunted and shoved another billet of wood into the stove. 'Won't be mattering much then. Not with you gone to sea, and unable to keep on tearing good cloaks in the briar. Now I'll only have your uncle's socks to darn. Doubt he'd be noticing knots, anyhow, with his callouses thick enough to sole boots. Kor, but it would be a blessing if he washed his feet more than once in a fortnight. His woollens would rot less, for one thing.'
Even through the chatter, Taen could sense her mother's distress. Carefully unmentioned between them hung the name of Marlson Emien, the son that Taen must sail north to oppose. Prolonging the moment she must leave for that purpose could do nothing to ease the heartache. The Dreamweaver caught her cloak from the bench and reached to gather up her bundle.
Her hand blundered into her mother's stout bulk, and the next instant she found herself buried in a smothering embrace. 'Don't you go cozening any more gifts from pirate captains' mates,' said the widow in a strangely altered voice.
Taen's protest emerged muffled by an apron that smelled of woodsmoke and, faintly, cleaned fish. She pulled back from her mother in affront. 'Corley's nobody's mate, but a captain and an officer of the Kielmark's. A shirt won on a bet doesn't mean he's in love with me. I understand from his crew that he has a collection of very lovely ladies that he visits at carefully measured intervals. All of them take money for their charms, and none of them have hair that smells of fish!'
But today Marl's widow did not respond with the dour, barbed wit Taen had known throughout childhood. Instead she raised a careworn hand and smoothed a black strand of hair that had escaped her daughter's braid. 'It's a husband you should be seeking, not some ill-turned adventure against Kor's Accursed that could leave you dead, or much worse.'
Silence fell in the tiny kitchen, heavy and dense and somehow untouched by the workaday bickering of children in Rat's Alley. Taen sighed, picked up her bundle, and paused by the door.
Her mother stood with her back turned, regret for her words and her faltering courage evident in her stiff pose. Taen blinked back sudden tears. 'I'll be back to marry when children can be born into Keithland without nightmares waiting to kill them.'
Marl's widow nodded, reached for a pot, and banged it angrily down on the stove. 'Just come back, girl,' she whispered. But Taen had already gone, and latched the door silently behind her.
Winter's chill hung damp on the air, and the wind blew brisk off the sea. Once past the shelter of Rat's Alley, Taen ran, fighting the tug of her cloak, her bundle bouncing off knees still scabbed from the briars she had hiked through in her outings across the tors. Ahead, across the market square hung with the drab tents of drying fishnets, she saw the masts and sails of the brigantines, tanbark-red against cloud-silvered sky. Already, tiny forms swarmed into the rigging, crewmen sent aloft to shorten sail. As Taen reached the docks, the lead vessel rounded with mechanical precision, backed sail, and dropped anchor with a splash like a faint plume of smoke. Even as her hook bit into the harbour bed, a longboat lowered from the davits. Oarsmen clambered aboard the instant the keel kissed water, and looms flashed and bit with the trained and deadly timing that marked the Kielmark's crews; none showed better discipline than the company under the command of Deison Corley, Taen decided. The longboat clove toward the wharf with near-uncanny speed.
Taen boarded the instant the boat reached the dock. The strong hands of the coxswain caught her bundle from her, and his call to resume stroke was obeyed with such promptness that Taen unbalanced and slammed rump first into the bow seat.
'Kor, man, be easy or ye'll bruise the goods.' The nearer of the starboard oarsmen capped his complaint with a gap-toothed grin at the Dreamweaver. Without missing stroke, he added, 'Welcome back, girlie. In the forecastle we've a pack o' cards that ain't too soggy yet. Got a game promised after the change in the watch.'
Taen caught her cloak hood before the wind scooped it from her head. 'I'll be there, but only if I can beg a stake of beans from the cook.'
'No bother,' said the oarsman with a wink. 'Some kind soul saved yer stash.'
'You?' Taen flushed in a manner that made even the roughest scoundrel in the boat draw back in appreciation. 'If you saved beans at all, it was to keep the wind in your sails.'
'Lively!' snapped the coxswain, as the crewman drew breath to defend his dignity. 'Dress oars, you fish-brained jacks, yer captain's watching.'
The looms rose dripping from the sea, and the longboat drifted smartly into the lee of the Kielmark's brigantine, Moonless. Taen reached out to catch the waiting rope, only to have it snatched from her hands by the oarsman she had just finished teasing. Another man caught her strongly from behind. 'Goods most certainly wasn't bruised,' he observed.
Taen tried to retaliate with a punch, but lost the chance as she was propelled strongly upward. Forced to abandon her reprisal and grab for the strakes, or risk a fall into the heaving sea beneath, she climbed. The next moment her bundle of belongings sailed boisterously over her shoulder, and the bearded, weather-beaten face of Deison Corley appeared at the rail.
A large man with chestnut hair only just beginning to grey, the captain caught her spare clothes. With the
reflexes of a trained swordsman, he slung them aside into the grasp of a sailor. 'Keep the tar on your mitts, not the dresses,' he cautioned, then reached out and caught the Dreamweaver's hand, half lifting her as she clambered aboard. Taen seemed even slighter than he remembered, her eyes enormous under the patterned border of her hood. Yet the wait and the worry had not sapped her spirit.
'You look as if a bellyful of sour apples left you griped,' the girl observed. 'Or do you wear that dumbfounded expression because you lost your whetstone overboard?'
Corley tugged the Dreamweaver off balance into his chest, his sea-roughened hands in no way clumsy as he flipped the hood over her eyes and bundled her into his embrace. 'I always pack spares.' His chestnut beard split to reveal a grin. 'And a lucky thing, too, for I see I may be needing my flints to blunt the edge from your tongue.'
Taen pinched him blindly in the arm and pulled free. She did not resist when Moonless's steward hustled her off to the dry warmth of the stern cabin. Beneath the captain's gruff humour, she had sensed the question he tactfully refrained from asking; the perception left her aching, for where Ivainson Jaric was concerned, she had no reassurance to offer at all.
IV
Light Falcon
Moonless raised anchor. Accompanied by her entourage, she scudded past Imrill Kand's headland without waiting for the tide to turn. The crossing to the shores of Hallowild was tempestuous and prolonged by contrary winds. Captain Corley kept to the quarterdeck except for brief intervals to snatch rest. But for fierce bouts of cards with the sailhands, Taen remained isolated. Daily she returned to the stern cabin and plied her talents to track the emergence of the Dark-dreamer's influence. Her findings were unremittingly bleak, a systematic destruction of lives and sanity that so far afflicted the country folk toward the north borders of Morbrith. The particulars Taen kept to herself, as well as the fact that Maelgrim's influence was predictably spreading southward. Corley could not drive his command any faster, and ill tidings could do nothing but blunt the spirits of his hardworking crew.