the blade lodged deeply in an oaken limb, recently sprung from the heart of Huma's chair.
The lad tugged at the sword and tugged again, glancing frantically over his throbbing shoulder as Vertumnus stepped menacingly forward. Then slowly Vertumnus lowered his sword. He measured Sturm as the boy labored his blade from the hard wood and smiled when the young man whirled awkwardly to face him.
Vertumnus's grin was baffling, as unreadable as the edge of the wilderness. It angered Sturm even more than his words. With another cry, he lunged at his adversary, and Vertumnus's knees buckled as the lad's blade drove cleanly into his chest.
Chapter 2
The flute clattered to the floor and lay still. Instantly the chill of winter returned and settled painfully about the Knights' feet. The hall lay silent, as if the air were frozen.
'Sturm…' Lord Stephan began in astonishment. The young man staggered, wrenched free the sword, and Vertumnus fell forward solidly and quite lifelessly. Gunthar rushed toward the Green Man, and Sturm winced as the strong hand of Lord Alfred clutched his shoulder.
The smear on Sturm's blade was clear and wet, and the resinous smell of evergreen rose from its blood gutter. He turned wildly, marking the puzzlement of Alfred, of Gunthar, Lord Stephan's strange wounded stare, and, by the sundered table, the anger of Lord Boniface, who glared incredulously and jealously at the lad, then stooped to wrench up his leggings.
'What have you done, lad?' Alfred bellowed.
Then Vertumnus sprang up and pushed the astonished Lord Gunthar aside. Throughout the hall rushed an enormous intake of breath, as though the room itself had gasped. As Lord Wilderness touched the wound in his chest, it puckered and closed like a scar in living wood. Serenely his eyes sought Sturm's.
'It has come to this, young Brightblade. You have made your point and mine,' Vertumnus announced, and the stones at his feet grew over with thick moss.
'The rest is your own foolishness. You have entered my game. Which, alas, you must now play to its end, as your shoulder will tell you daily and nightly.'
Outside the window, the songbirds choired again. Wide-eyed, Sturm looked from the Green Man to his unwiped sword, from the sword back to Vertumnus. In great perplexity, with controlled focus, the young man touched his blade. It was dry and clean.
'Meet me on the first day of spring,' Vertumnus ordered, again with a strange smile. 'In my stronghold amid the Southern Darkwoods. Come there alone, and we shall settle this-sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man. You have defended your father's honor, and now I challenge yours. For now I owe you a stroke, as you owe me a life. For it is written in your cherished Measure that
Sturm looked about him in confusion. Gunthar and Alfred stood frozen on the dais, and Lord Stephan opened his mouth to speak, but no words came forth.
Hawk-eyed, expectant, Lord Boniface nodded. What Vertumnus said concerning returning blow was indeed enshrined in the Measure. Sturm was trapped in an ancient statute by his impulsive deed.
'I will lead you to that place when the time comes,' Vertumnus announced. 'And you might learn something of your father in that place and time. However, you must make your own way. If you fail to meet me at the appointed place, on the appointed night, your honor is forever forfeit.
'Nor is your honor alone in jeopardy,' Lord Wilderness continued with a mysterious smile. 'For indeed, you owe me a life, Sturm Brightblade, and you will pay it whether or not you arrive at the appointed time.'
Dramatically he gestured at the lad's shoulder.
'You can come like a child of the Order and meet my challenge,' he pronounced, 'or you can cower in the halls of this fortress and await the greening of your wound. For the deeds of my sword bloom forth in the spring, and their blossoms are dreadful and fatal.'
The hall filled with more leaves and vines and tendrils, with briars and roots and branches enough to take a week to clear. The Green Man closed his eyes, bowed his head, and vanished amid the rustle as the torches on the walls burst suddenly into a cold white flame. Astonished, Sturm squinted through the shadowy thicket, but Vertumnus was truly gone, leaving behind mist and woodsmoke and the watery, metallic smell of the woods after lightning.
'Of all the trouble you might have uprooted, lad,' Lord Alfred proclaimed sorrowfully, 'of all you might have done or left undone, this indeed was the worst of things.'
'The worst of things?' Sturm asked. 'I… I don't…'
Already, with their sober efficiency, the young knights were clearing the hall of foliage and brambles. Sturm stood in the midst of the razing and repair, looking up at the assembly of Knights who had gathered beside the empty throne of Huma. The young man shook his head, trying to banish the night as he would a confusing dream.
'Will you follow me, Sturm Brightblade?' Lord Alfred asked, this time in a softer voice. Gunthar and Stephan closed ranks behind him, their ceremonial armor glittering almost blindingly. From their places amid the wreckage of Vertumnus's visit, Lord Adamant and Lord Boniface joined the formidable triad.
Like suns, the lad thought. Like suns and meteors. I cannot approach them, and it is hard even to look at them.
'I thought…' Sturm began, but in the echoing hall, his voice was thin and weak. He couldn't say what he had thought. He could no longer think of it.
Alfred nodded, and Lord Gunthar stepped forward as Alfred gracefully took the younger man's place beside Stephan.
Behind him, the sawing and hacking died. Only the servants continued with their tasks-old Reza and the boy, Jack, sweeping up the last of the shattered crystal. The young men of the Order, reluctant to do a servant's work in the first place, had stopped to listen to the drama unfolding beside Huma's throne, delighting in the discomfort and possibly the punishment of one almost their age. For despite its devotion to the various honors of the Measure, the Clerist's Tower was home to gossip and to rivalry that was not always friendly.
Lord Stephan was a veteran of these wars, too. He stepped toward Sturm and, clutching the lad's arm in his gloved hand, led him past the craning necks and the sidelong glances, straight through the western door into the hush of the chapel. Lords Gunthar and Alfred followed closely behind, and behind them, the renowned Lord Boniface. Those left in the council hall returned to their business, no doubt imagining great mysteries and chastisements unfolding in the tinted light of the locked room.
There Lord Stephan seated the lad none too softly on an oaken bench by the window. Sturm clutched his shoulder and shivered as the wind crept through the old stone tracery behind him. But he shivered also at the ancient patterns in the stained glass: the rose, the horns of the bison, the yellow harp and the white sphere, the blue helix, all within the silver triangle of the great god Paladine, who contains all things and yet transcends them. All were symbols of the old pantheon, which the Order still honored, despite dark times and the dangers of Ansalon.
The shelves sagged with thick, leather-bound volumes of mathematics, physics, architecture-studies the young man had shunned in the sparse days with his mother in Solace. 'Sturm,' she had warned him then, 'it is the books for you now. Sword and Order and father have failed you. A scholar may not be a wealthy man, but a scholar eats, his house safe from fire and his head from the axe.' Sturm frowned and shook his head: The Lady Ilys had called out these things from the centermost room of the cottage, a chamber away from the light and windows. He had pretended to listen, then set aside the books and scrambled to the thatched roof of the house. There, above his mother's admonishments, he fixed his eyes to the north, over the Plains of Abanasinia, where the horizon was nothing but light and plains, but a boy could imagine the turbulent Straits of Schallsea and north of that the southernmost coasts of Solamnia.
