“What’s excitin’ ye so?” Rhiannon replied, trying to calm the girl. “Might it be Lennard? Has the lad found his walking legs?”
“No, not Lennard. Not yet,” Siana puffed, fighting to find her breath.
“What then?”
“It is Bryan!” Siana shouted. “He is alive!”
“Has he come across?” Rhiannon gasped, unable to hide the eagerness on her face. She, like so many others, badly wanted to meet the half-elven hero.
“No,” replied Siana. “But another family, a woman and her two children, came into the camp just a few minutes ago, looking for me. She brought news of Bryan; ’twas he who saved her and her children.”
Rhiannon, though obviously disappointed, was far from surprised. “Suren that one’s making a name that will live on through the centuries,” she remarked, a twinkle of admiration in her bright eyes.
“He is making a name with the talons, too!” laughed Siana. “They call him the ’ghost fighter’ and greatly fear him.”
“As well they should,” Rhiannon replied. “Me hopes and heart’s out to the lad; so much good he has done. Come now, take me to this woman. I’m wishing to hear another tale of Bryan of Corning. Never will I tire of them!”
Later that evening, Rhiannon attended to the young boy and his infant sister, mostly cleaning their scrapes and washing the grime of their ordeal from their bodies and their thoughts, while the woman recounted the exploits of her rescuer.
“He saved me and mine,” she kept saying, her eyes rimmed with tears. “I try not to think of what the talons would have done to us if they…” She couldn’t complete the thought, and Rhiannon did not want her to.
“Rest easy,” said the witch’s daughter. “Yer children are fine, and the thoughts of their troubles will soon fall far behind. What ye all be needin’ now is sleep. She left the tent with Siana close behind. Jolsen stayed on awhile, talking to Lennard.
Siana started off to the north, toward the Calvan encampment, but Rhiannon took her by the arm and steered her toward the riverbank instead. Rhiannon did not like going to the army camp, with its grim reminders of the soldiers’ true purpose in being here.
“Let us go and see the river,” she said. “Her song’ll put us far from this place.”
Siana readily agreed and followed Rhiannon down to the water’s edge, slumping down in the grass beside her friend. Rhiannon clutched her knees up close to her chest and let the notes of the flowing water fill her ears.
Siana sat in silence, respecting the privacy of Rhiannon’s thoughts. And soon Siana, too, fell under the calming spell of the rhythmic roll of the wide river, and time slipped by both of them without notice and without care.
But then suddenly Rhiannon sprang up, her eyes wide in surprise as she stared at the river.
“What is it?” Siana pressed, amazed at her friend’s distress. Unlike Rhiannon, so attuned to the voice of the natural world, Siana did not hear the discordant notes of the river’s song.
“Not to me knowing,” Rhiannon answered, equally perplexed. She had heard the river’s lament, clearly and undeniably, just as surely as she had understood the truth of the talon force and their dark leader back when she and the rangers had arrived in Corning. She stepped down to the water and knelt, putting her hands into the flow.
“Is something wrong?” Siana asked, moving down beside her. “What did you see?”
“Hear,” Rhiannon corrected, still examining the water.
“Then what did you hear?” Siana asked.
“Sadness,” Rhiannon answered, unable to explain, for she did not fully understand it herself. The river had called to her, its normally impassive voice suddenly filled with sorrow.
A moment later, when a horn drifted into the young woman’s hands, she came to understand. She jumped to her feet, unblinking, her chest heaving in a fight to find her breath.
“What?” Siana pleaded, trying desperately to help her friend.
Rhiannon gasped and held out the horn. “Andovar’s horn,” she managed to stammer.
“Your ranger friend?” Siana asked. “But how did it get in the river?”
Rhiannon knew. The river had told her, and now the horn, verily vibrating with the drama of Andovar’s final moments of life and with the residual emanations of the unnatural, un-dead thing that had slain him, painted the horrible picture all too clearly.
“Me friend is dead,” Rhiannon replied, hardly believing the words even as she spoke them. “In the river.”
“You cannot know that,” Siana argued, rushing to hold Rhiannon’s trembling form. “Even if this is Andovar’s horn-”
“It is his,” Rhiannon insisted.
“And a hundred answers could tell why it is now in the river,” reasoned Siana. “You cannot assume that he is dead just because-”
Rhiannon stopped her with a look. The young witch put her gaze directly into Siana’s eyes, an expression so sorrow-filled that Siana could not remember the remaining words of her argument.
“He is dead,” Rhiannon said again. “I wish it were not so, but I cannot…” She couldn’t find the strength to finish; all the energy just slipped out of her body, out on the tears that now streamed freely down her cheeks.
“May I enter?”
The morning light filtering through the tent flap found the young woman sitting on a small stool, still clutching her legs close to her chest, as she had on the grass beside the river the night before.
Rhiannon hesitated at the unexpected intrusion, then nodded slightly. The King was on his way into her tent anyway.
“Your friend told me of your discovery,” Benador explained, and he glanced around the little tent and saw the horn lying on the single table. “Is that it?” he asked.
Again Rhiannon nodded.
Benador went over to inspect the find. “It does appear to be Andovar’s,” he conceded.
“It was,” Rhiannon said, not a hint of doubt in her shaky voice.
“Many years I spent in the company of Andovar, and all the rangers,” the King remarked. “When Ungden held the throne, it was they who sheltered me and prepared me for the day when Pallendara would be restored to the rightful line, the day when I would be king.”
“Andovar told me the tale on the road south,” Rhiannon replied. “In his heart, he was yer friend.”
“He is my friend,” Benador corrected.
“Was,” Rhiannon replied, undaunted, though another line of tears inevitably began making their way down her face.
“Can you be so certain?” Benador asked her.
Rhiannon’s look told him that she, at least, sincerely believed in the truth of her words. “It was Andovar’s horn,” she said, a chill in her voice. “And Andovar was wearing it when he died.”
“My lady-” Benador began, still doubting.
“Ye know who I am?” Rhiannon asked before he could continue his disputing logic.
“Your mother is Brielle of Avalon.”
“Then ye should know to trust me words,” Rhiannon interrupted. “Andovar died in the river. And there he remains, and there he’ll e’er remain.”
Benador’s mouth still hung open, but he found no words to fill it. She was the witch’s daughter, a witch herself, if everything that Belexus and Andovar had told him was true. And while Benador was King of all Calva, he was, in the end, just a mortal man, and he could not begin to understand the powers that this young woman possessed, and could not refute her claims.
“I meant to come and visit you sooner,” he began, changing the subject. “But my duty has kept me busy in the camp.”
“Ye need not apologize, good King,” Rhiannon answered.
“We owe you our thanks.”
“No more than mine is owed to yerself,” said Rhiannon, and she looked the man in the eye. “I’ve helped as much as I might, but ’tis yerself and yer men who hold back the tide of blackness. Without ye, all the world would have fallen to the likes of the Black Warlock and his filthy minions.”
Benador accepted the compliment with a smile. “Your own value cannot be underestimated,” he said. “You have saved many a life, and have made things easier for many more still. When all of this is ended, Rhiannon, the daughter of the Emerald Witch, will not be left out of the tales.”