Lady Mearah nodded. She didn’t waste time telling him to learn further about the whereabouts of Dezra Majere. One by blood, the other by marriage, these women were kin to a powerful mage, one whose whereabouts were not precisely known. They bore watching, and Tavar knew his business.
Lady Mearah put her finger on the center of a blood red gem set in the silver torque around the dark elf’s own neck. The ruby, a love-gift, glowed in response to her touch. There was not much magic left in the world, but this small gem still possessed something of its old nature in that it retained the ability to know a loved one’s touch and respond warmly. Tavar closed her hand in his own, a quick gesture, a secret clasping. He was Silvanesti, cast out from his homeland before the Chaos War, before the Blue Lady’s War, even before the War of the Lance. He was over one hundred years old, yet he looked like a handsome youth. As well as Lady Mearah’s confidant and the chief of her most loyal men, a shadowy band of dark elves and renegade humans, he was her lover.
It was not something either of them wanted known. They had too many enemies—some in common, and some not.
Tavar lifted her hand and brushed her fingers with his lips. Wordless, he left, moving soundlessly across the gallery, gliding down the stone steps. She watched him stand and look at the skirmishers then walk away. By the time he was out of her sight, Tavar Evenstar was out of her mind, her attention again on the men below.
At Sir Radulf’s command, Lady Mearah had ordered her knights to inspect the weapons they’d found here the first day of the occupation in preparation for taking Old Keep as their headquarters. Not much had seemed worth keeping, the weaponry of farmers and shopkeepers—in Lady Mearah’s opinion, worth no more than hayforks and wood axes. At the commander’s wish, she’d had much of it taken out and replaced by good swords and pikes, mail and lances and spiked maces. In the bowels of the place she’d ordered a forge set up. To feed the fires she’d commandeered workers from Haven’s citizenry to harvest the forest. Under close guard, young men from the city went out in the morning and came back with carts full of wood. One or two had tried to escape. They had not gone far before archers hidden in the trees stopped them.
The bodies were left as warning. It was her mark, just as the blood red sword embroidered on the black silk tunic she wore was hers.
“My lady,” said a voice behind her. Agmar, Sir Radulf’s dark-eyed squire, stepped out of the shadows.
The door into the vast second floor chamber that served as Sir Radulf’s own quarters and wardroom stood ajar. The scent of wine and woodsmoke drifted into the gallery. From within came a clipped, “At once, Sir Radulf,” followed by the sound of another door closing.
The squire seemed to have heard neither. He sketched a perfunctory bow. “Sir Radulf sent me to find you. He’s ready for the nightly report.”
“I’m at his disposal.”
She said so, but Lady Mearah didn’t immediately move, instead leaving the squire to bow and withdraw. She was Palanthian, and though subordinate in rank to Sir Radulf Eigerson, her lineage was subordinate to that of very few people, and certainly not to any tally of Sir Radulf Eigerson’s forebears. Rank must be respected, but Lady Mearah was of the kind of folk who knew about nuance, and just how much of a nuanced delay a man like Sir Radulf would understand or tolerate.
She looked once more upon the games below. A smear of blood marred the scrubbed slates of the floor, and one of the combatants went limping off the field. His fellows got back to the business of testing themselves and training. Lady Mearah was pleased. They were like her armory—hard and cold and very strong.
Someone cried out, a harsh curse, and steel belled on steel. She watched the two fighters, men from her own talon. They had been hers from the day she joined Sir Radulf’s command, months before. Loyal, fierce, and devoted to their lady, these men and others formed the nucleus of a group of knights she could count on, steady as stone and willing to do whatever she asked.
Lady Mearah nodded, well content, and went to answer her commander’s summons. As she closed the door to Sir Radulf’s quarters, she framed the nightly report, the tally of men on the walls, the state of the food supply and the readiness the caravans and escorts ready to keep the city provisioned. In her mind, she organized rumors and facts, and she considered the reports from her personal spies, men like Tavar Evenstar. Some she would keep to herself, but she decided to include Tavar’s speculations about the woman Usha Majere.
“I’ve heard, my lord, that you’ve had some contact with her.”
Sir Radulf looked up, eyes narrowed. “I have. Your point?”
One of the torches on the wall hissed and snapped, and the flame flared. In the changing light, his face seemed sharply sculpted, his eyes cold gleams in deep sockets. That look could rock a knight back on her heels, but Lady Mearah smiled right into it.
“No great point, though it is interesting that the wife of a mage once so powerful is abroad in the city.” She shrugged. “I’m sure she’s quite harmless.”
“Utterly,” Sir Radulf said. “A saucy tongue, as I recall, but no more.”
Lady Mearah waited for dismissal, straight and tall and holding back a bit of Tavar’s news. She would not mention anything about Dezra Majere. Lady Mearah didn’t like to raise questions until she had some idea how she might find the answers.
9
The woman is like a sword!
The image of Aline Wrackham startled Dezra, even as it formed. Since their last encounter, most of Dez’s contact with Qui’thonas had been with Dunbrae. Aline left much of the daily business of putting the refugee movement together in the dwarf’s hands. Aline’s were matters of finances, the secret slipping of steel coin or firm promises along avenues as covert as actual paths Qui’thonas used into and out from Haven. From Usha’s telling of Aline’s wedding journey, Dezra thought of Aline Wrackham as a mousy poet-girl with few prospects, who gave in to the command of a grandfather happy enough to sell her in marriage. For a good cause, yes; and Aline had made good use of her gains, but it remained that she’d let herself be sold.
Because no one would ever be able to sell Dezra that way, not for the best and brightest cause in the world, she’d harbored a quiet, perhaps pitying scorn—the girl should have had a decent respect for herself. She’d thought so when she first heard the tale, and though she’d appreciated finding safe harbor in Rose Hall the night Haven fell, she’d even thought so the night she’s accepted Aline’s invitation to become part of Qui’thonas. Nothing had blurred that first impression of Aline until the startling image that formed this evening.
Yet that’s what Aline Wrackham was like—a ready sword, as she paced the oak plank floor where once a thick Tarsian carpet had lain, in the highest room of Rose Hall.
“This won’t be an easy resurrection,” Aline said, her glance leaping from one to the other of those gathered—Dezra, Dunbrae, and—to Dezra’s unvoiced disgust—Madoc Diviner. That one, Dezra thought, never takes his eyes from Aline. Neither did Aline fail to glance at him from time to time, and when she did, her cheek grew dusky. It wasn’t an attractive sight, the blush like a mottled brick. Still, it seemed to please Madoc.
“Qui’thonas won’t have an easy resurrection, but it will be a resurrection,” Aline assured them. Gowned in the high-necked, long-sleeved muted shades of mourning, in the gray light after a rainy day’s sunset, she strode like a commander on the ramparts. Quiet fire lighted her eyes, and her homely face she set like steel “Madoc tells me that many of the old paths into Haven from the river side of the city are gone, overgrown.”
The mage nodded. “Darken Wood doesn’t take long to reclaim its own.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s the air of elven hiding-magic on the Qualinesti side, but those paths are gone. Be that as it may, we wouldn’t be running on that side of the wood. Damned knights are going to be peering out of every shadow there. So we can’t go east or south. And it’s madness to go deeper into Darken Wood and risk running afoul of the centaurs.”