the instructions of elf and female in the use of the lances.
Instead of instructions, I listened to the laughter of gamblers and the songs, songs which, if not invented in secret by Breca, were invented in secret by one much like him:
Oh where the north wall is crumbling,
let us put mortar and brick,
let us stack limestone on limestone
laid down with a promise and lick,
And wherever limestone will fail us
and mortar and brick give way,
Let us stack footman on footman
laid down with the promise of pay.
And listened to the politics from on high, to the speculations of Heros and the grumbling of the foot soldiers. For something was clearly afoot, and Heros described it as a bitter dance of moons, Derek's on the wane and Sturm's waxing, power flowing like light away from one man into another.
Heros championed neither of the factions: both were, as he would say,
Derek, on the other hand, had ceased to be an option, his armor too bright from polishing too much and too long, his eyes too bright from something far more unsettling than wine or the fever of approaching battle. He had taken to winding a horn in imitation of Huma, and at all hours of the night the footmen were called on alert, equipped and assembled to find only that the alarm had been raised by Lord Derek himself, alarmed by what he considered the unnatural closeness — or sometimes distance — of the red moon and the silver. And the men did not complain loudly, nor comment too loudly when Lord Derek wore the horns of a stag on his helmet, as if in recalling the old divine contest between the hero and the quarry, he had chosen to play both the hunter and the hunted.
It was one night, not long before his riding forth, pursuing a disaster of which you have no doubt heard, that I was awakened once again by the sound of the horn winding. I armed myself, thinking continually,
I stood beside Breca, who never took his eyes from thesolitary figure as he leaned on the pommel of his two handed sword, chuckling a dry laugh as desolate as the winter outside the fortress and, glancing sideways at me, murmuring,
And when I ventured that perhaps Lord Derek had lost some faculties, but that the most brilliant of generals often seemed at sea in the times of peace and waiting, Breca asked me where I had read such things,
And so in the early days of the siege, before Lord Derek unraveled completely and rode off into death and the horrible oblivion of legends, we spent our time watching the battlements and the dwindling food, looking for smoke on the horizon and listening to the sound of the horn by night and the rumor by day that somewhere, forgotten within the bowels of the fortress, lay something the kender had stumbled upon in his curious wanderings, something that could — if time and place and desperation were to meet — alter the course of the siege.
It is tiring to remember this all, Bayard, for already I grow unaccustomed to the old habit of seeing, and though it would seem that the memory of vision would be that much more strongly burned into the thoughts of the newly blind, when you lose the habits of seeing you often lose the memories of sight, for the motions of the eyes and the mind grow rusty and with them the thoughts established before through those motions.
And what is more, the light must be fading, night must be approaching, for the warmth that settles upon the sill of my window is fading now and I smell smoke and burning tallow as I face into the room. Some things there are for which the night should have no ear, and among those are the ride of Lord Derek and the disasters that followed. So again in the morning, if my nurse will only remain patient — patient and undeniably kind — I shall recount the darkest leg of the journey.
THREE
It was rumor that passed among us once more, rumor again of movement and of battle, but this time there seemed more substance to it, for on the battlements and in the chambers the knights were silent, the only storm arising from a conference room high in the tower, where Alfred and Derek and Sturm waged a war of words and of rising voices, an occasional shout or a fragment of speech caught when the wind died and the sound descended to the courtyards and the barracks of the fortress.
We could make nothing of this debate above us, these loud quarrels like the distant cries of predatory birds, but it was different from the nights of the winding horn, the sudden preparations for the false alarms, for now we did nothing but wait — no preparations, no rumors of what was taking place beyond
I awoke on the second night to the jostling of Heros. He was fully armed, having dressed himself while I slept, as though there was no time to waken a squire (or as I came to see later, as though somehow in arming himself he took part in a strange penance, having last performed the task on the night of vigil before his knighthood ceremonies).
There was nothing to be said, nothing to be asked except,
His eyes still avoided me.
From the window of the corridor they looked diminished, frail in their armor and swords and pikes as they assembled, stamped the cold from their feet, and fell into line behind the mounted knights. I could single out Breca in the foremost column, standing a head taller than those around him, and once I believe he glanced up at the window to where I was standing, the flatness of his eyes apparent even from a distance, even through the shadows