"It appears we are to break our fast alone this morning," Moira said, pulling her chair closer to the table. She poured herself a tankard of ale and used her knife to hack off a chunk of cheese and a thick slice of bread. With the knife point she speared one of the onions and took a healthy bite.
Although the idea of beer and onions for breakfast made Wiz a little queasy, he followed suit. In spite of his misgivings the combination was delicious. The cheese was sharp and tangy, the onions were mild and sweet and the ale refreshingly astringent on his tongue.
"Doesn’t time run differently in these places?" Wiz asked Moira around a mouthful of bread and cheese.
"Not if the elf lord does not will it so," she said. "He promised me when we entered that it would not."
"So that’s what that greeting was all about!"
"Just so. Albeit we had little enough choice should he have decided to make centuries pass like minutes."
"I take it we’re going on this morning?"
"I doubt Duke Aelric’s hospitality holds for more than a single night," said Moira, appropriating the heel of the loaf. "Besides, the sooner we reach our destination the better." She looked at the bread and sighed. "I wish we could carry bread like this on our journey. It is unusually good."
"It’s baked by elves," Wiz said smiling.
"Their servants morelike. What’s so funny?"
"Never mind," Wiz chuckled. "I’m not even going to try to explain it to you." Then he turned serious. "What are the chances someone is going to be waiting for us outside?"
"Small enough. Oh, they may watch the door we entered like cats at a mouse hole. But I do not think we will go out that same way. Not only time but space runs strangely in places the elves make their own."
Wiz picked up the last crumb of cheese and popped it into his mouth. He let it melt away on his tongue savoring the bite and flavor. "Well, when do we leave?"
"As soon as we gather our things," said Moira. She stood up from the table and fastened her cloak at her pale freckled throat with the turquoise and silver clasp. Wiz followed suit, throwing his cloak over his back.
"Don’t we need to ring for someone to show us out?"
"I doubt it," said Moira as she reached for the door handle. "If a guide is needed one will be waiting when we open the door."
The door swung outward at her touch and brilliant morning sunlight flooded in. Instead of a marble corridor lined with travertine pillars the door opened into a sunny forest glade. An orange and brown butterfly flitted lazily above the deep green grass that ran to their threshold.
Moira looked over at Wiz, smiled slightly and shrugged. Wiz shrugged back. Then they adjusted their packs and set out under the warm morning sun.
Six
Hearts’ Ease
The morning was bright and sunny. Instead of dark and sinister, the Wild Wood was fresh and green. There was almost nothing among the trees and ferns to remind them of the night before.
Their path led out of the glade and back up the heavily wooded hill above the door. There was no hint or scent of danger, but still they moved along quickly.
They climbed a series of forested ridges, each looking down on the tops of the trees in the valley below. At the top of the third ridge, Moira scanned the valley while Wiz sat puffing on a rocky outcrop.
"There!" the hedge witch said, pointing. Below and off to one side a square stone tower stood rough and grey above the trees of the forest. About its base clustered outbuildings enclosed by a stockade of peeled logs.
"Heart’s Ease," said Moira. "Our journey’s end." She shifted her pack as Wiz struggled to his feet and they headed off down the path.
"Will we be safe here?" Wiz asked as the trail flattened out in the valley and he found he had breath for more than walking.
"In daylight nothing dare come close," Moira told him. "Anything magic here would be immediately known to the Watchers. There are non-magic agents, of course, human and such, but…" she shrugged. "We are safe here as anywhere."
"Thank God!" Wiz said fervently.
Moira frowned. "Do not be so free with names of power."
"I’m sorry," Wiz said contritely.
The forest enclosed them until they were almost on top of the castle. The trees were as huge and hoary as anywhere in the Wild Wood, but they didn’t seem as threatening here.
"It feels friendly," Wiz said wonderingly, aware for the first time how oppressive the Wild Wood had been at its most benign.
"It is friendlier," Moira agreed. "The forest folk hereabouts are kindly disposed toward the inhabitants of Heart’s Ease. They watch over the place and those who live there." She shifted her pack with a swell and jiggle in her blouse that made Wiz’s heart catch. "Besides, this is a quiet zone. There is almost no magic here, for good or ill."
Atros returned to his sleeping chamber fuming. It had been a long, frustrating evening. Damn those elves and their impudence! They had spirited his quarry out from his very grasp, humiliated him in front of the entire League and ruined his plans. His impromptu army disintegrated once they knew the elf duke guested the two they sought.
So they had been making for the elf hill after all, the wizard thought as he stripped off his bearskin cloak by the light of a single lamp glowing magically in one corner. He did not understand it and he was too tired to really think upon it. Perhaps the one who had been Summoned was some strange kind of elf and not a man at all? True, Toth-Set-Ra’s scrying demon had called the Summoned a man, but demons could be wrong.
Too many possibilities, he thought as he pulled his silken tunic over his head. For now sleep and in the morning . . . He moved toward the great canopied bed and then stopped. There was something, or someone, making an untidy lump under the sheets. He stepped back cautiously and possessed himself of his staff. He muttered a protective spell and then moved to the bed again. Reaching out with his staff, he flipped back the fine woolen coverlet and recoiled at what lay beneath.
There on the gore-clotted sheets was a thing which had once been a man. His back was broken, his ribs were smashed, his arms and legs dislocated and cruelly contorted, and his head lay at an impossible angle. But worse, he had no skin. He had been so expertly flayed that even his nose remained in place. His pallid eyeballs stared up at the ceiling and his ivory white teeth seemed to smile out of the mass of bloody tissue that had been a face.
Even in its present state, Atros had no difficulty identifying the body as Kar-Sher, Keeper of the Sea of Scrying.
"Do you like my little present, Atros?" hissed a familiar, hateful voice. The dark-haired giant started and looked around. In the shadows behind the feebly glowing lamp a face took shape. The face of Toth-Set-Ra.
"I told one I know what he was called," the wizard’s voice went on, soft and full of menace. "Not his true name, Atros, just what he was called. And you see the result."
The old wizard cackled. "Oh, I did take his skin afterwards. I needed it, you see. It is amazing what you can do with the skin of a wizard, even a wizard who set himself so much above his station. A wizard who was such an inexpert plotter as this one."
Atros looked around wildly, swinging his staff this way and that to try to ward off an attack.
"I tell you again Atros, the League is mine!" The skull-face image said. "You, all of you, exist to serve me. And serve me you shall—one way or the other. Meditate upon that, Atros. Meditate upon it while you sleep."
The image winked out, leaving Atros alone in the chamber cold and shaking. Did the old crow mean to spare his life? Or was this just some torture designed to shake his will before he too was killed?