She looked at him now, sun-colored hair stirred by the cold wind, blue eyes soft with his thoughts, long legs crossed tailor-fashion as he leaned toward the fire. Lean and fit, a border ranger’s air of danger and, aye, romance hung about him. It was impossible to think that he was anything but a few years older than Hauk.
“I think,” she said hesitantly, “that we all seem young to you.”
“Well, sometimes you do. I’ve seen one hundred summers, Kelida. That makes you and Hauk seem young to me. I’m a young man by the standards of my own kin.” He smiled and shrugged. “It only gets confusing when I’m not with elves. There’s all the years lived.” He tapped his chest, suddenly tight and aching. “Then there’s this, this heart, which reminds me how young I truly am.”
Lehr abandoned his watch path and trotted north up-river, head low like a hound scenting trouble. Tyorl, who knew the look, got to his feet.
“Kelida, go get Finn.”
She felt the sudden tension in his voice and scrambled to her feet. Before she could ask a question, he was gone, running down to the water. Lavim smelled the smoke just as the wind shifted. Stretched at full length on his stomach by the riverside, he thought of campfires and warmth. He’d certainly appreciate some warmth now. His old black coat lay nearby on the bank and he was wet to the shoulders from trying to catch fish with his hands as he’d seen Lehr doing earlier. You’d think, he told himself, that it would be as easy as it looks!
Nothing is as easy as it looks, Lavim.
Lavim said nothing, only plunged his hands into the icy water again. Too late! The bass flew through his fingers, tickling his palm as it darted out of the shallows under the bank and into the center of the river. Lavim jerked his hands out of the water and, shaking off the icy water, tucked them under his arms.
It’s all a matter of perspective, Lavim. When you look into the water you don’t see what you think you see. Neither does the fish, for that matter, when he looks up.
“Uh-huh,” Lavim muttered. “You’d know that, having been a fish most of your life, eh?”
All in all, Piper growled, I think the wrong one of us is being testy. After all, I’m the one who’s dead. If anyone has a right to be testy, it’s me.
“I’m not being testy. I’m trying to catch breakfast. Piper,” he said suddenly, “I’m sorry that you’re dead. I didn’t know you when you were alive, but—I’m sorry. What does it feel like, being dead?”
Piper was silent for a moment. It doesn’t really feel like anything.
“Where are you?”
I’m inside your head, and in the netherworld.
“What does it look like?”
Piper laughed. It’s foggy—in both places. Lavim, you’ve got another chance at a fish.
A brown trout, nearly as long and plump as the bass, glided into the still water of the shallows. A lazy shrug of its tail put the fish into the thick grasses waving just below the water’s surface. Lavim grinned and raised his hands to strike again.
Aim a little ahead and to the side.
“Why?”
Because you want a trout for breakfast.
Judging this to be a good enough reason, Lavim did as Piper suggested.
“Hah!” he crowed as his fingers curled around the trout. He yanked the fish from the water, dripping and glistening in the moonlight. “Gotcha!”
But the trout wriggled, squirming against his palms, and Lavim, fascinated by the feel of scales against his skin, loosened his grip slightly. As though winged, the fish leaped from his hands and flopped back into the water.
“Damn!” Lavim flipped over onto his back, disgusted and too cold to plunge his blue-knuckled hands into the water again. The smell of wood smoke thickened on the wind. “What are they doing with that fire, anyway? They’re going to—”
Lavim!
“Gods, Piper, don’t bellow like that! It makes my ears pop! What?”
Dragons!
“Where?” Lavim snatched up his coat and hoopak and scrambled to his feet, his eyes on the sky. “Where?”
North! Get back to the camp, Lavim! There’s one over the forest and heading for the river!
Grinning, Lavim ran for the river camp. Everyone was always talking about dragons: red ones, black ones, blue, and green, a whole rainbow of them. Lavim had only ever seen one—the one red that’d flown high, daily passes over Long Ridge.
The kender laughed aloud as he dashed toward the cave, trying to watch the sky and the ground at the same time. His luck was about to change!
20
Hauk’s dreams were made of stone and moved like ghosts, silently on the near wall of his prison. When they’d first come, he’d thought them a sign of approaching madness.
He didn’t care anymore. He was waiting to die, and to truly die this time. Though Realgar asked no more questions, showed him no more twisted visions, he still amused himself with his game of death. Sudden as a hawk dropping for prey or lazy as a vulture wheeling and waiting, death lived in this dank tomb, whispering his name and sometimes clawing him with cold, cold hands, dragging him through black gates to a realm where the air gnawed at his lungs with teeth of ice.
Hauk had long ago lost count of his deaths and only lay in darkness watching dreams on the wall as they slid across rough stone. He saw the forest. Qualinesti, the green and shadowed homeland of the elves, was lit by thick, honey gold columns of sunlight. Like a dream within a dream, Tyorl drifted through glades and thick stands of pine and aspen. A strange look haunted his eyes, long blue eyes that Hauk knew welclass="underline" a friend’s eyes. Pain lived there, and grief and—almost—resignation. He followed paths known only to the elves and he was always searching.
Like smoke drifting on the wind, the dream shifted and he was once again in the tavern in Long Ridge. A girl with copper braids and leaf-green eyes smiled at him.
Aye, he thought, but she never did, did she? She’d only shrunk from him in fear and then, suddenly angry, spat in his eye. When the anger had fled, wariness crept into her eyes. Never a smile.
What was her name? He’d never known.
He looked closer at the wall, trying to see the dream and see her face more clearly. Tall, she was, or tall for a girl. She’d stood only a hand shorter than he. The girl. The barmaid. What was her name?
The scene on the wall shimmered, wavered, and afraid that he would lose sight of this girl who made up the only memory Realgar had never pried from him, Hauk reached out, his hand crabbing toward the wall. Aye, tall, he thought as the dream became suddenly sharper. She appeared as a hunter or even a ranger, carrying a sword and wearing a cloak the color of her eyes, with hunting leathers the color of a storm sky. Hunter-girl, ranger-girl, what is your name?
As he asked the silent question, she turned, her face white, her emerald eyes dark. She held out her hand, a graceful gesture of welcome. A cold spill of light winked on sapphires and gold.
She wore his sword, the one Realgar called Stormblade, at her hip. The dream shattered, splintered by a bolt of white hot pain striking hard at his eyes, running in jagged edges down the length of his spine. Hauk cried out in grief for the dream killed and the cry echoed around the prison.
Someone held a lantern high, spilling light like fire all over the floor. Old and dry, choking with its own kind of mourning, a voice haunted the shadows behind the light.
“He won’t have it. He won’t.”
Hauk knew the voice. Mad and old, held together with whispers like spider webs, he’d often heard it rustling around the edges of his nightmares, laughing or sobbing as he died.
Groaning, Hauk asked the question that had never yet received an answer. “Who are you?”