He heard Hauk’s voice behind him. Stanach turned. Hauk looked down at Stormblade in Hornfel’s hand.
Slowly, Hornfel laid the sword down beside Tyorl. The flash of loathing in Hornfel’s eyes toward the Kingsword, momentarily seen and instantly hidden, chilled Stanach’s heart. Stormblade’s sapphired hilt caught the fading light. The fire of Reorx’s forge pulsed in the flat of the blade.
Wordlessly, Hauk took Lavim’s place. He placed shaking fingers on Tyorl’s arm. His lips moved soundlessly, repeating the name of the friend who had traveled so far to rescue him from Realgar’s torments. Hauk’s were the bleakest eyes Stanach had ever seen.
Stanach touched Kelida’s shoulder gently. “Lyt chwaer. ” He went to his heels beside her.
“I sent Lavim for Kembal.” Grief made a tattered thing of her low voice. “It won’t matter. Tyorl is dying, Stanach.”
He wrapped his arms around her, supporting her while she held Tyorl.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Kelida leaned against Stanach’s shoulder and buried her face in his thick, black beard.
Stanach stroked her shoulder gently and looked up to meet Hauk’s eyes. The ranger’s disbelief, and his struggle to understand that his friend was dying, made him seem suddenly very young.
Tyorl stirred. His lips moved as though he tried to speak. When his hand moved in Kelida’s she turned, green eyes shimmering with her tears. Gently, so that she didn’t jar him, Kelida bent and lightly kissed him.
“Ah,” Tyorl whispered, “you kissed me for luck and farewell once before—in Long Ridge.” He lifted his hand, touched her face, her hair.
“Kelida.”
Stanach felt her move as she caught Tyorl’s falling hand. Kelida sobbed, and Stanach’s heart ached with stunned grief.
Tyorl was dead of Stormblade’s steel.
32
Stormblade.
Kingsword made from pieces of twilight and a midnight star. Though it was his, Hornfel had not buckled on the sword, not felt its weight on his hip, in all the three days since the battle in Northgate. Though the dwarves of Thorbardin acknowledged him, cheerfully some and sullenly others, as king regent, his investiture would not take place for seven nights. It would not be appropriate for him to wear the Kingsword before then.
Hornfel lifted the lid of the coffer that held Stormblade. Lined with velvet the color of smoke, satin the color of the steel’s red heart, this coffer had held the Kingswords of generations of high kings. Now it holds that of a king regent, he thought, and holds it here in the Court of Thanes, well under guard, but here for all to see, wonder at, exclaim over.
They had come like people seeking the blessings of a relic. The Court of Thanes had never been so well guarded as it had these two days past. The house guards of each of the six thanedoms stood shared watches for all the hours of the day and night.
Hornfel stepped back from the coffer, away from the long display case, which looked more and more like a bier each time he saw it. He wondered if any Kingsword had ever cost so dearly as Stormblade had cost. When word returned to the Theiwar fighting at the Klar city that their thane was dead, they had fallen into confused disarray and fled back their dark cities.
It was a confusion, Hornfel thought now, that would not find resolution until the Theiwar found time to stand back from the bloody waters of their own internal politics and choose a leader from among those still living. Though Ranee would not admit to a death count, in the farming warrens Ranee’s Daergar had moved swiftly and savagely against the refugees. Sturm had pinned them neatly in the south entrance to the farming warrens and Caramon had closed them in from the north. Tanis and his captains had stood true.
It was the end of the revolution. Ranee stood by his claim of defending his holding when he’d thought it surrounded by Outlanders taking advantage of the Theiwar uprising to loot and pillage. None could prove he was allied with Realgar.
Hornfel shuddered and found his eyes drawn to the sword. Silver chased gold hilt, perfect sapphires, and a flame-hearted blade of finest steeclass="underline" it was the price of so many lives!
His weariness was soul-deep and he didn’t know how he was going to make his regency worth the lives of the kin, friends, and strangers who had died for it.
He heard a footstep behind him. Hornfel turned, thinking suddenly of Piper. He almost called the mage’s name aloud, but stopped himself when the kender, Lavim, rounded a broad, high column.
Hornfel stared at the kender. He had gotten past twenty-four armed warriors and none of them could have so much as thought a shadow was passing!
The kender, cheerfully unconcerned, greeted Hornfel with casual goodwill. “You know, sir, they’ve been looking for you all over the place. It’s almost sunset now. They’ll be waiting for you in the Valley of the Thanes. Me, I figured this was where you’d be, so I came to get you. Besides, I kind of wanted to get another look at Stormblade.” He cocked a thumb at the Kingsword. “I’ve been looking at that thing for a couple of weeks now. I have to tell you, it doesn’t look like itself in there.”
Hornfel smiled. “What does it look like?”
“Well, bigger, I guess.”
Lavim stepped closer to the coffer for a better look. Hornfel kept close beside him. Amusing and ingenuous as he was, Lavim was still, after all, a kender.
“No,” Lavim said, revising his opinion. “Not bigger. Just—I dunno, not like Kelida’s sword. Or Hauk’s. Or whoever’s it is.” Lavim shrugged and then looked up at a deeply shadowed corner of the far ceiling, his eyes narrowed. “Right. His.”
A shiver of something partly fear and partly anticipation slid along Hornfel’s arms. “Lavim,” he said slowly, carefully, “who are you talking to?”
Lavim’s face, a weathered mass of deep wrinkles, brightened. “Piper, of course.”
Piper. Hornfel had heard the story in the gatehouse, Lavim’s fast-talking explanation as to how he came to be entering Northgate by a five-foot ledge a thousand feet above a burning valley. The kender claimed that he spoke with Piper’s ghost. To his credit, Finn grudgingly backed Lavim up. Hornfel did not know what to believe.
Lavim, his eyes full of mischief, cocked his head again, listening to some voice Hornfel could not hear. “Oh,” he said as though reminded of something, “right. I forgot.” Hands kender-quick, he reached into a deep pocket of his old black coat and rummaged only a little. What he produced from that pocket made Hornfel smile. Cherry wood, polished smooth as satin, and so very familiar, the kender held up Jordy’s pipe.
“You know this, don’t you? Piper’s flute. It’s magic. I know because I used it twice. Once to save young Stanach from the—the waddayacall’ems—”
“Theiwar.”
“Right. And once to transport me and Finn and Kem and—” Lavim hesitated only a little, his eyes darkening. “—and Tyorl out of the Hills of Blood. Stanach was going to bring it back to you because he said that you and Piper were particular friends.”
“Particular friends, eh? Stanach said that?”
“Well, no. I just did. But Stanach would have said it if he’d thought of it.”
Hornfel reached out and ran a finger down the flute’s length. “Does he really talk to you, Lavim?”
Lavim nodded vigorously, white braid bobbing. “Oh, sure he does. He told me all about how you kept him out of the dungeons and how light gets into the city from outside and about the gardens and farms.” Lavim’s eyes twinkled. “And he told me something else, too. He told me—oh. Well, I can’t tell you that.” He shrugged. “But never mind, you’ll know all about it soon anyway. There’s one thing I can tell you.”
Amused, Hornfel smiled indulgently. “What is that?”