C. Dale Brittain (45 page)

The green light was approaching her, bobbing as though being carried, though the source was still hidden by a curve in the tunnel.
 
And suddenly she came around the corner face-to-face with someone her size.

Both of them gave startled cries and pulled back.
 
“I did hear someone!” the being before her shouted, crawling backwards rapidly.
 
“And it’s got blood on it!”

“Wait!
 
Don’t go!” she said, holding out a hand.
 
“I won’t hurt you.
 
I just got scraped on the rocks and bushes coming down the cliff.
 
Are you—
 
Are you a faey?”

It couldn’t be a faey, she thought; he was much too big.
 
But he stopped his retreat, picked up the lamp again, and squinted at her.
 
“What do you know of faeys?”

“Back in the southern kingdoms,” she said—of course everyone in Hadros’s lands considered themselves to be in the northern kingdoms, but up here
everything
else was south—“I was a friend of the faeys.”
 
After a moment she added, “They tamed me.”

“It’s a tame mortal!” he called excitedly over his shoulder, then added reluctantly, “Or so she says.”

“That’s right,” she said eagerly.
 
She had no idea what faeys were doing here, especially such large ones, but faeys meant safety.

He called back over his shoulder again, answering excited questions while keeping a careful eye on her.
 
But at last he said, “As long as you’re here, would you like to wash off the blood?
 
And would you like something to eat?”

Karin groped out of the tunnels by the insufficient light of the faeys’ lamps.
 
Since it was now night, they reassured her, the dragon would have retreated to its lair and would no longer be a problem.
 
“We never can understand why you mortals insist on being outside during daylight.
 
Daylight is dangerous!” they told her.

And climbing around in the night was also dangerous.
 
But there should be a moon for at least the early part of the night, she thought, and maybe, somehow, by morning she could find her way back to the salt river—that is, if the ship was even still there, if any of the men were still alive.
 
Eirik and his men had, after all, taken her up to their fortress in no more than half an hour; all she had to do was find the path.

She felt strangely heartened by her day with the faeys.
 
They had rubbed herbal pastes on her scrapes and bruises and fed her mountain blueberries.
 
They might be almost as big as mortals up here in the north, but they were still the eager and easily-worried beings she had first known as a girl.
 
If beings like this could exist even here, within a short distance of a dragon, then safety might not be as illusory as she sometimes feared.

Either that, or security by its very nature was only to be found in tiny pockets in the midst of danger.

Someone was standing just outside the tunnel.
 
He stood quietly, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, a sword in his hand.

The faeys were instantly gone and their light with them, fading away back into their tunnel without a sound.
 
Karin remained on hands and knees, just back from the entrance, considering.
 
Whoever it was, he did not seem to notice her.
 
He shifted, raising his head as though listening, then again took his waiting pose.

Her choices were to retreat with the faeys, she thought, spending perhaps many more days in their tunnels, or to come out and face whoever this was.
 
If it was one of Hadros’s men, she should be safe with him.
 
Eirik was a different consideration.
 
But would Eirik be waiting quietly outside a faeys’ tunnel?

She could not stay underground forever, in spite of dragons and renegade kings.
 
She felt at her belt, then remembered her knife was gone.
 
Shaking her head, she rose to her feet anyway and came out of the tunnel.

And saw as he whirled toward her that it was Roric.
 
She almost collapsed with relief as his arms went around her.

“The lords of voima be praised,” he murmured after a moment, drawing his lips back from hers.
 
“I didn’t dare hope the Wanderers would save you.”

“I saved myself,” she said a little testily, even while pressing herself close against him.
 
“The Wanderers had nothing to do with it.
 
The last one I’ve seen is the one who took Valmar.”

“There is one here, up on the mountain.
 
But did the raiders harm you, Karin?” kissing her scraped forehead.

“No—all my wounds came from escaping the dragon.
 
I think their leader was planning to ransom me, but his woman helped me escape.”
 
She would tell him later about Eirik and Wigla.

“How did you get into the crevice?”

“I crawled in,” she said in surprise.
 
“There are faeys in there, large faeys.
 
How did you find me?”

He still held her to him, rocking slowly back and forth.
 
“I was fairly high up, watching.
 
I saw you appear this morning, then saw the dragon coming.
 
I was much too far away to do anything—by the Wanderers, Karin, you can’t know how terrible that was!
 
But I marked where you disappeared, and when the dragon moved off—I didn’t know even creatures of voima could be that enormous!—I found the way to bring me here.
 
When I discovered no blood and none of your clothing or hair, I even hoped you might have crawled into this crevice.”

“Then why did you not follow me?”

“I’ve always said there is voima about you, Karin,” he murmured, his lips in her hair.
 
“I could see the crevice, its smooth walls, its flat sandy floor, but I could not enter.
 
It was as though the air in the entrance had turned to glass.
 
My only hope then was that you
were
there, that you were safe, and that somehow you would come out to me.”

Karin looked in surprise at the shadowed crevice, then shrugged.
 
The faeys had always had the ability to protect themselves but she did not have time to think about them further.
 
“And the others?”

“The dragon ate somebody—I think one of Hadros’s men, though I was too far away to see.
 
I can understand someone allowing a troll to live under his bridge, Karin, but to keep a dragon as your doorkeeper!”

“They give honor to the lords of death,” she said in a small voice.
 
The person eaten could have been herself.
 
But whoever it was, if it was one of Hadros’s warriors she had known him.
 
The days when she had managed the king’s household, making sure the food was prepared and the ale brewed, seemed so distant they could have happened to somebody else.

“The dragon seemed to satisfy its hunger with just one man,” said Roric.
 
He drew back and looked at her in the moonlight.
 
“This has been your expedition from the beginning, and if they ever make a song of it you will be at the center.
 
Your own voima protected us as we came north, and then you here escaped both raiders and a serpent.
 
At the moment all I have is my sword and you—I don’t even have my horse, not that he’d be much use now.
 
So you tell me.
 
Your father and Hadros must still be looking for you.
 
Do we go home with them—Hadros intends to bring me up before the Gemot to answer for the blood-guilt on me—or do we keep on trying to find Valmar?”

“Find Valmar, of course.
 
We haven’t come all this distance to let him be sent to Hel.”

“Well,” said Roric with a low chuckle, “at this rate we may be seeing him there soon.”

They scrambled westward across the rock scree, their way lit by the shifting and deceptive blue light of the moon.
 
It has hard to tell distances, to distinguish between a hole and a shadow, and Roric was more awkward on a steep surface than she in spite of his much greater strength.
 
But they gradually worked their way up and down boulders, paths, and crevices until they reached a vantage point from which they could see the stars glinting on the uneasy surface of the sea.

They sat for a moment on the rocks, catching their breaths and looking at the moon.
 
“Wigla—the woman who helped me escape from the raiders’ fortress—seemed to know about the Witch of the Western Cliffs,” said Karin.
 
“So she must live somewhere near here.”

“Your Mirror-seer then directed us truly,” commented Roric, which she herself did not yet entirely believe.
 
“Where would a witch live?
 
In a cave?”

“Look!” said Karin, pointing onward.
 
Just a short distance beyond them, near where the stone scree dropped away in cliffs to the sea, was a spot of light.
 
It looked like firelight, from a fire deep in the rocks, and from it thin smoke was rising.

“That wouldn’t be the raiders again?” asked Roric cautiously.

“No, no,” said Karin confidently.
 
“Eirik’s fortress is far behind us.
 
It must be the witch’s cave.”
 
She jumped to her feet, then added slowly, “I hope we have what she wants us to pay her.”

The moon was sinking, but there was still enough light for them to scramble the last quarter mile toward the red glow.
 
When they reached it they discovered they were looking down something of a chimney, a gap in the rocks through which they could see a fire burning far below.

“There must be an entrance somewhere near here,” said Karin, smiling to herself when she realized she was thinking of the Witch of the Western Cliffs as being something like one of the faeys.
 
“Let’s try over there; it looks like another opening.”

This opening did not really resemble a doorway, but at least it was not a chimney.
 
“Should we just go right in?” said Roric, peering in.
 
A tunnel led downward at a sharp angle.
 
They could just see a light glowing faintly.

Karin felt gripped by a sudden strange reluctance, but she pushed it forcibly away.
 
This was no time to let her dislike for closed passages influence her.
 
“Yes!” she said, not giving herself time to hesitate.
 
“We’ll go right in.”
 
She crawled determinedly forward, Roric at her heels.

As they left the outer world behind, she expected to come almost immediately face-to-face with a witch, but instead the passage led them down into a broad room, burrowed out among the rocks.
 
At the moment it seemed empty, in spite of the fire at this end.
 
It was so tall and so wide that the far side was lost in darkness.

But there was a faint sound from the far side, not a voice, almost a rumble.
 
Roric looked at her questioningly.
 
This was no time for cowardice, she told herself.
 
She took his hand for reassurance and started forward toward that sound.
 
But they had walked only a short distance when she stumbled.

They were wading through piles of something small and hard, pebbles, she thought at first until she reached down to pick one up.
 
It was a gold coin.

They both stopped then to look around.
 
In the fire’s faint light they could see they stood on top of an entirely unexpected and almost unimaginable heap of treasure.
 
There were precious stones here, both in worked jewelry and unset, heaps of coins, golden helms, swords gleaming through half-decayed leather sheaths.

Could this be Eirik’s treasure house? she wondered.
 
But even a renegade, outlawed king who commanded treasure like this would not have to run for long.

And the next thing she saw was a human bone.

The sound from the far, dark side of the room became louder.
 
Whatever was there seemed to have heard their approach and be coming to meet them with a combination of rumbling and rattling, laid over a steady scrape.

“We may be visiting the lords of death even sooner than we expected, my sweet,” said Roric, low in her ear.
 
“This isn’t the cave of any witch.
 
This is the dragon’s lair.”

4

“Did the Wanderers tell you they created those creatures of the third force?” the young woman asked Valmar.

He had been dozing, her head on his shoulder, and it took a few seconds for her words to reach him.
 
But then he rolled around to look at her, propping himself up on an elbow.
 
“Created them?
 
No!
 
But—
 
They told me they wanted them overcome.
 
I don’t believe you.”