His hands glowed with a silver light that seemed to cleanse the green and sickly light of the phosfire until the clearing glowed with a fresh white glow like that from a marvelous candle.
With rising courage and confidence I rushed through the midst of the enemy, calling for Brithelm over the sound of their shrieking, which was changing slowly to the bleating of goats. The satyrs turned to face me, but did nothing, and I passed among them easily and without harm.
I rushed to one of the posts that held up the platform and scrambled up it like a squirrel, until I stood on the rickety platform, puffing, sweating, and shouting in triumph.
That was when the Scorpion rose from his throne.
The dark hood still covered his face, but there was something about the bend of his shoulders, of his knees, that signaled defeat. It was a gesture someone would make in a bad painting.
But as Brithelm rose onto the platform, the Scorpion stood to his full height, threw back his shoulders, and stared into our faces.
His eyes whirled red, then yellow, then white, then blue, like the burning of a thousand suns. He turned the shimmering crystal towards us in the shifting swamplight.
It flashed green and yellow and green. For a moment Brithelm lost his balance, plummeted into the empty air, then caught himself on the side of the platform. I staggered backward toward the edge, toward the long drop onto the floor of the clearing. In that moment the battle had turned. We were both defeated. But not Bayard. As anyone could see in his gait, in the straight and dauntless arch of his back as he leaped for the base of the platform, armor and all, and grabbed it firmly and easily, pulling himself up onto the platform in one incredible movement. The Scorpion turned to face him, with only one satyr, although a big one, between the Knight and the sinister caped figure.
The satyr lunged at Bayard, and his spear passed through the Knight, who kept walking as though nothing had happened, straight through the wavering, translucent body of his adversary, as though the satyr were made of smoke or steam. The creature evaporated and in its stead a goat, looking confused and a little embarrassed, clattered into the smoke-filled cabin behind us.
Now Bayard stood beside the cowering Scorpion. He raised his sword, holding it in both hands like an executioner or a woodsman, and brought it crashing down.
Brought it down through hood, through cloak, through tunic, and into the rotten wood of the platform. And through nothing else.
For there were only three of us on the platform, not counting the goat. Bayard and I stood around a dark robe spread like a pool over the platform, over a dark tunic and a pair of shiny black boots. We stood at the front of a ramshackle cabin I remembered from earlier that night, and behind the cabin the swamp was beginning to redden and glow—not with the fires that earlier encircled this place, but with genuine and entirely welcome sunlight. Brithelm pulled himself painfully up from the edge of the platform where he had been clinging. Below us, Agion rubbed his shoulder quietly, gaping amidst a herd of goats. His wound had closed as the sunlight first touched the clearing. When I saw that, I was gaping, too.
“That, I suppose, is that?” the centaur called up to us, gently nudging away a spotted kid that came up to nuzzle his leg.
I glanced at Brithelm, who rubbed his head quietly, staring up at the cabin with admiration and wonder. He was silent, was lost in the strange thoughts of the blessed.
So I looked again at Bayard, who stood astraddle the heap of abandoned clothing, looking back at me.
“What do you think, sir? Is that, that?”
“No, Galen,” Sir Bayard replied, sheathing his sword and casting a puzzled look off into the swamp.
“Though I understand little else of what has just transpired, I can tell you this much. That is anything but that.”
Part II
House of Di Caela
Chapter Nine
“No matter what you say, little brother, this is the kind of place I have sought and awaited. The kind of place I have dreamed of, continually and in humility, I hope. I have prayed to the gods for such a place, in which to take hermitage, alone with thoughts and meditations and with the gentle creatures of the marshes.”
So I kept hearing from Brithelm, who had found meaning and purpose in the struggle we had waged in the swamp, there in the very clearing where we still sat by midmorning, pondering several of many imponderables. Bayard, too, was tired of listening to Brithelm’s praise of “the gentle creatures of the marshes,” especially since some of those gentle creatures—namely the satyrs—had been looking to waylay us since we arrived in the swamp.
“My dreams take me to other places, Brithelm,” he said. “And I for one would arise and travel to Castle di Caela in quest of the hand of the Lady Enid, were it not for the restraining commands of our centaur companion.” Bayard nodded curtly at Agion.
This had been going on for hours: a running argument between Sir Bayard and Agion as to whether obligations had been met, so to speak. Bayard claimed that the swamp was now free of satyrs and whatever evil had led them against the centaurs in the first place. He claimed that since there was no longer any enemy to fight, our job in these parts was done. And since we had cleared our names in this issue beyond any doubt, the centaurs should allow us to go on our way.
Agion, on the other hand, would have been much more comfortable if he could carry back to his centaur friends some satyrs’ heads on pikes. According to him, a grisly trophy was better than peace or than any number of strong promises. And there would be no trophies nor peace offerings from mysteriously vanished satyrs. I could understand Agion’s point of view, and by this time I rather liked the big, stupid thing. But as long as he held out for evidence, we were stuck in the swamp—there were no satyr heads for the having simply because there were no satyrs any longer, if there ever were any to begin with.
Bayard, on the other hand, had not given up the tournament at Castle di Caela. He still had designs on being there in time to enter the lists in the match for the hand of Enid di Caela, for whose unseen smile or unseen approving glance our hero would gladly batter senseless all the unmarried men of Ansalon. That was still eleven days away, he said, and if we left at once we could be in Castle di Caela in plenty of time, and exhaust neither Valorous nor ourselves all that much. All this providing we left at once.
Leaving at once sounded pretty good to me, too. This was a miserable place, and I had not forgotten the other elder brother, no doubt entombed in my father’s armor somewhere nearby, who could be more than embarrassing for me if, dead or alive, he somehow came unswamped.
“Agion,” Bayard argued, “we have stood by one another, have fought side by side. If we were to go over the events of last night, I am sure each of us could find a moment, an occasion upon which he might argue that he saved the other’s life. Given that closeness, the bond of trust that has arisen between us, could you still keep me from leaving?”
“Yes.”
I had to step in. Things were going absolutely nowhere.
“Look, Agion,” I began, leaning heavily against the wall of the cabin, then becoming aware of what I was doing and backing off gingerly in mistrust of rot and of bad architecture. “Look, Agion, what is it that keeps you from letting us simply walk out of here, when we’ve shown you our innocence through our actions? Or do you still think we were the ones who stirred up the satyrs?”