The Book of Fire (11 page)

“Well,” Rose concluded finally, “we shall do what we must.”

Linden nodded, then offered Erde a small, silent smile and padded away, gathering up a stray armload of dirty dishes as she went.

Rose watched after her soberly. “She fears our medical supplies won’t last past January. Her final harvest is usually in early November, and here it is, just September. Even if we do get a thaw, who knows what will be left alive under all this snow.”

Erde thought of the parched peanut fields around Master Djawara’s home in what N’Doch called “the bush.” “Where I just came from, there’s not enough water. Not anywhere, except the salty oceans. And here there’s too much. And there, they kept saying how it was so much hotter than usual.”

“And here, too cold. It’s all gone out of balance, hasn’t it? I blame this priest and the evil he’s stirred up.” Rose let a pensive moment fall between one thought and the next. “Which reminds me, Raven tells me you’ve had some dreams I should hear about.”

“I guess.” Erde loved Rose, but often found her directness and air of authority intimidating. Even her beloved
grandmother, a powerful baroness required to work in the world of men, had been somewhat more . . . feminine in her approach.

“What kind of dreams?”

“Um . . .” Erde found a sudden reason to fuss with the hem of her sleeve. “Do you really think Brother Guillemo has brought all this wrong weather upon us? Is he truly a sorcerer?”

“You know his power as well as I do, child, perhaps better. But we were speaking of dreams. Come on, now, out with it.”

Erde brushed invisible crumbs across the worn planks of the table. “Well, they’re . . . umm . . .”

“If you told Raven, you can certainly tell me.”

“I didn’t tell Raven . . . not really. Well, I told her I’d seen the hell-priest in my dreams, which is true, but . . .”

“But? There’s something more important than Fra Guill?”

Spoken aloud, the priest’s nickname made her shiver. “I don’t know. It’s all mixed up together.” There was a larger significance to these dreams than her own confused feelings, and it was her duty to reveal them. “Fra Guill is part of it, but . . . well, um . . . what would you say if you had dreams, I mean, really
real
dreams, as if you’d actually traveled there, about someone you knew was your enemy, and he’s there in your dream and you’re almost talking to him and he doesn’t seem like he could really be your enemy, and then suddenly he isn’t, because the real enemy is someone else?”

“Goodness. Breathe, child!”

Erde realized she hadn’t been.

Rose waited a moment before asking, “Does this no-longer-an-enemy have a name?”

Erde nodded. The hardest part of all was going to be speaking it out loud. Her lips moved uselessly.

“Haven’t we been through this before?”

“No, this is different. It’s not Rainer.” Whose name had lodged in her throat the night she’d thought him murdered by her father’s order, and rendered her mute for months until she had discovered him alive again. “I mean, I can say the name. I just . . .”

“Then just say it and get it over with.”

“Adolphus of Köthen.”

Rose sat back a little. “Dolph? You’ve been dreaming about Dolph?”

Rose was surprised, but Erde was even more so, to hear Baron Köthen spoken of so familiarly by someone without estates or title. Or perhaps Deep Moor was Rose’s estate. Erde had never thought to ask. Now she nodded and braced herself for ridicule. But Rose pursed her lips thoughtfully. Raven glided past behind them, trailing a fond hand across their shoulders. Rose caught the hand and held it. “You might want to hear this.”

Raven leaned over. “Is that all right, sweeting? Do you mind?”

Erde shrugged. Her humiliation might as well be total.

Raven sat, reaching for Erde’s hand to press it lightly between her own.

“Our Erde has been dreaming about Adolphus of Köthen,” Rose announced.

“Really?” Raven laughed deep in her throat. “Can’t say as I blame her.”

Erde looked down, heat and confusion flooding her cheeks already.

“Raven, please . . .”

“Can’t I compliment her on her good taste?”

“Just listen,” said Rose irritably.

“I don’t understand . . .” Erde began.

Raven squeezed her hand. “Don’t feel badly, sweeting. It’s all rather . . . complicated. Isn’t it, Rose?”

“I think we’ll leave your past out of this for now,” said Rose. “Now, child, when you left for, well, this other place you’ve been, Baron Köthen was in revolt with your father and Fra Guill to usurp the King. So you must have had news of the war since you returned, yes? I mean, about Dolph’s, shall we say, conversion?”

“Conversion?” She needed to hear it again. She needed it confirmed. Beyond all misunderstanding.

“You heard he switched sides.”

The smile bloomed on Erde’s face before she could take control of it. Her dreams had been true. “And is he now leading the King’s armies to victory?”

Rose and Raven exchanged glances.

“No,” said Raven. “Not exactly . . .”

Erde’s heart contracted. They were telling her he was dead. And since her dreams had been true, she knew how it had occurred.

Rose laid a hand on her wrist. “If you’ve not had news, why did you say he was no longer your enemy?”

Now that Baron Köthen’s name was on the table, the rest of the tale came out in a rush. “Because I dreamed it. That’s what I’m telling you. I saw the enemy camp. I saw my father in it. I saw everything that happened: the hell-priest murdering poor Prince Carl and making it look like suicide, then trying to blame it on Baron Köthen, and when that didn’t work, accusing him of witchcraft and heretical practices, so that the only thing left for the baron to do was to flee to the other side! He meant to bring Prince Carl’s body home to the King.” She glanced from one to the other, awaiting their painful revelation. “Did he?”

“Don’t you know?” asked Rose.

“That dream stopped there, and no one has said if . . .”

Raven leaned forward. “He brought the prince’s body to Hal, who he knew would receive him. But few people know this. The official word is that Carl survived to go into hiding, and that Fra Guill is faking the reports of his death to suit himself. No one knows the truth besides His Majesty, Hal, and a few trusted allies, plus Dolph and the men who stayed loyal to him.”

“And you.” Rose tapped a fingernail rhythmically on the tabletop. “You have had a true dream, Erde von Alte.”

“More than one,” Erde murmured. There was still the truth of the last one to be gotten over with. “They frightened me. Sometimes it was like being a bird on his shoulder. So close. I even spoke to him, and once, I think . . . no, I am sure he heard me.”

“In the dream he heard you?” Raven rested her chin in her hands. “What did you say to him?”

“It was in the clearing where he found Prince Carl’s body. The priest had him outnumbered. I told him to run, save himself. I could see how he hated Fra Guill, how he despised my father.”

“His own fault for taking them as allies,” remarked Rose.

“He regretted that.” But here Erde was on shaky
ground. She didn’t know that for sure. “So I told him that a true prince might still live, not a weakling like poor Carl, but a rightful heir that he could feel proud to pledge fealty to. But then, worst of all, the priest heard me, too! And unlike Baron Köthen, he knew it was me! ‘The witch-girl,’ he called me. ‘She’s here! The witch-girl!’ And then I couldn’t wake up . . .!” Erde buried her face in her hands with a shudder. The mere memory of her subsequent journey to and from limbo terrified her all over again. She wouldn’t tell that part of the tale just now.

“It looks like poor Dolph has been telling the truth,” Raven observed quietly. “At least, his version of it.”

“The part he’s willing to let himself understand,” agreed Rose.

Poor Dolph? But at least they were speaking of him in present tense.

“Then . . . he’s alive?”

“So far,” said Raven, “No thanks to his own efforts.”

“Information has been scanty,” Rose added, “what with the weather and our needing Lily and Margit close to home for our own protection. Hal’s sent a bird now and then when he remembers.”

She hardly dared to ask it. “When was the last one?”

“Not long ago. A few weeks.”

Not long, no, but long enough for a man to lie dead and frozen on the field like the others she had seen in her dream. Erde pushed the thought away and let the rugged, able image of a
living
Baron Köthen fill her mind’s eye. The very image of a leader. “‘Poor Dolph,’ you said? Did anyone doubt him?”

Raven spread her hands. “Inevitably.”

“But they mustn’t! It’s all true! I saw it with my own eyes. I was there!”

“Well, no. You weren’t,” said Rose.

“But it was
like
I was there!”

“Apparently. And that is the interesting thing.” Rose sat back, rubbing her palms together. “Truth is, I wouldn’t mind hearing what Dolph has to say. We’ll not stop Fra Guill until we fully understand the nature of his power. Another version of this story might just shed some light on that mystery.”

“Dolph is a boy’s name,” murmured Erde, unaware until Raven laughed that she had spoken this thought out loud.

“He was a boy, or very nearly, when I knew him. A beautiful boy.”

“No longer,” said Rose heavily.

Raven nodded. “Bright ambition in the youth can darken to obsession in the man . . . especially if that ambition is thwarted.”

Erde felt she’d lost the thread of their conversation. “But if he’s alive and on our side now, what can the problem be?”

Rose eyed her sympathetically. “I don’t know what he has done to so earn your good opinion of him, but you must realize, dear child, that in one fateful moment, Adolphus Michael von Hoffman, Baron Köthen, went from being the most powerful and respected younger lord in the kingdom, with his hand poised for the throne, to being a fugitive of dubious integrity, under suspicion of sorcery and without lands or forces to call his own. We’re told it’s been hard on him.”

“But what about Hal?” Didn’t he . . . couldn’t he . . . sorcery? She had imagined the two of them, man and mentor, joining forces to win great victories together.

“Hal’s kept him alive and out of the hands of the witch hunters.”

“Whom he’s had so much practice eluding himself,” noted Raven.

“But Hal Engle, as you know, serves His Majesty first and foremost, and even he can’t be sure of where Dolph’s true loyalties lie.”

Erde’s mouth took on a stubborn tilt. “King Otto is old and weak! My father always said so. Baron Köthen only wanted the throne so he could keep the kingdom together. I heard him say so to Hal. You’ll see—when the true prince is recognized, Adolphus of Köthen will pledge to him and help him make the kingdom great again!” If indeed, she added silently, he is still alive to do it. She wouldn’t know, until the next bird arrived.

“Well,” said Rose, raising a doubtful brow.

But Raven smiled. “I guess there’s no doubt where your loyalties lie.”

It isn’t until the three men turn up out of the blizzard that N’Doch comes to and realizes what a fool’s paradise he’s been living in. They ride in out of the storm and bring the cold light of reality with them. He only needs one look at their grim and weary faces.

This Deep Moor place, he reflects, is like one of those fancy damn R&R resorts, where the army sends the battle-crazed recruits to pump ’em up with enough hooch and tail and m.j. so they can send ’em back out to the front again. But then he can’t help but grin.
So far all I’ve gotten is the hooch.

The dragons have gone down the valley for exercise, as if the storm was nothing to them. But they come flickering in out of nowhere, bringing the first sighting of the intruders’ approach. The girl bursts out of the house to greet them. N’Doch is out in the yard, now that they’ve found him some serious clothing to wear, learning how to shovel snow. There’s plenty of it to shovel, and he keeps at it while the girl confers with the dragons.

“Visitors!” she exclaims, then hightails it back into the house.

The dogs report in next. N’Doch loves how they bound along, just like the herd of antelopes he saw in a vid once, silent and eager, sailing through snowdrifts as high as veldt grass. They race straight to the tall woman Doritt, who seems to have the same sort of way with them that Papa Dja has with his mangy pack of strays. Some things, he thinks, never change. Like how she squats her odd angular body down among them in the wind-driven snow, patting and murmuring, then gets up and marches into the Big House like she’s got their actual words to convey.

N’Doch likes how the farmstead is always busy, even now, in the midst of a storm. Paths snake through the snow between all the outbuildings. It snowed yesterday and the day before, and now the snow is falling again, a soft swirling mist that whitens the air and fills in the path behind him. He has to work hard to keep up with it. Storm or no storm, there are cows to be milked and chickens to be fed
and eggs to be collected. When he really thinks about where he is, timewise, he’s not so surprised that these women have to do everything by hand. He’s learned there’s a bake house, a laundry, an old-time forge, and a potter’s kiln among the many smaller wood-and-stone buildings that circle the big central farm house. And even a man who was blown to bits less than a week ago gets a shovel stuck in his hand or a load of wood to carry.